ONCE upon a time, not so long ago, Moscow was a place of romance: exciting it was to stand in the midnight snow in Red Square, watching the changing of the guard at Lenin's Tomb, the Red Flag streaming dramatically against the night sky; to visit Pushkin's house and discover, on his piano, a picture of John Field; to sit gingerly on the delicate gilt chairs in the Bolshoi Theatre enveloped by the music, or on a bench in Gorky Park drenched by the golden fall of autumnal leaves.
Now all is changed, and James Young, in Moscow Mule, gives us the new, improved Moscow of McDonald's and Mars bars, of crooks and computers, of bands and bandwagoners. In his nightmarish wanderings through Russia's capital we meet musicians, fascists, transvestites, muggers, poets and beggars. We share his 22-storey-high flat with cockroaches, peer with him through the spyhole to watch a beggar and a baglady have sex, shiver with fear as he and a friend accost a couple of no-goods who rob an old woman on the Metro, look (though we'd rather not) at the bile-green gob of spit that constantly streams from his friend Georgi's disgusted mouth, all the while priding ourselves on our tolerance for the author has the enviable skill of being able to describe the guilty and the greedy, the driven and the disenchanted, without being in any way judgmental. Awful as some of the characters are who vomit, stumble and otherwise negotiate their devious way through the pages of this book, you can't help but like them.
James Young is a musician: his last book was about his experiences touring as pianist for a solo tour by Nico, of Velvet Underground. Perhaps because of this, he wisely describes himself in his passport as a Business Consultant. His first visit was in October 1993, in the company of one Eggie, an ex-jailbird who told his wife Petula that he was just stepping outside to get a bottle of milk and then stepped on a flight to Moscow instead. The author is in Moscow to examine the possibility of making a radio programme about the sounds of the city, while Eggie has come along for the ride - as many as he can get, before being summoned home by Petula.
The two begin a sort of Nighttown journey among the drop-outs, the druggies and the disinclined of the New Russia. Georgi, the champion spitter in a city of spitters, has only a few teeth. The rest were knocked out by an argument with a car in Gorki Park, despite the rule forbidding cars in the park. There is Misha, a musician who earns a living as a translator and who fixes them up with a room in a flat belonging to a Welsh woman who is in Moscow to set up a network of cash machines - and teach Russian people how to spend their money.
Liz takes them to Rosie O'Grady's, an ex-pat hang-out on Novy Arbat. Inside, Eggie meets up with a drama student called Cinnamon with "cheeks as pink as a freshly-spanked bottom" He gets nowhere with her, but outside makes some headway with a man from Astrakhan who's into caviar. Later, he takes Cinnamon to a market where she eyes a rabbit-fur hat; but Eggie draws the line. "Could have been Bright-Eyes," he says. He may be a crook but he's still kind to animals.
Russia is going through turmoil at present and, as it does, a few individuals are starting to emerge from the masses. Read all about them here - but don't blame me if they turn out to be the sort of people you wouldn't normally invite home to tea.