These two characters, Alice the American and Lev the Russian are the two endpoints of this enormous tug-of-war that is the battlefield on which Vodka plays out its liquor-drenched emotional epic saga. And trust me, if you don't drink, you're going to be hugely fascinated (as I was) by the amount of vodka drinking that goes on throughout this book. I thought books like Lawrence Block's early entries in his Matt Scudder series did just about whatever there was to be done with alcohol addiction that you could fit in to a crime novel. But Vodka makes even a lifetime of personal stories told at AA meetings seem like fairy tales in a kindergarten. There's excess here, in excess. Everybody drinks all day long, from the prime minister and president of the country, down to the cops and the criminals, and even the kids. Everybody except Alice Lidell's surgeon husband, and he's portrayed as a wuss anyway.

But vodka is more than just a plot device in this book. It's a part of the story itself, because it's a part of the country. Vodka is a metaphor for Russia itself: clear as ice, apparently without flavour or odour, but wholly unique, holding its secrets tightly within its molecules, giving them up only to those willing to imbibe it in huge, enormous, mind-numbing doses. You can understand Russia, sure. But understanding will come close to killing you as well. And like some of the characters discover too late in the book, perfect understanding comes only with erasure of your own life. Russia accepts no other partner in her claim over your consciousness.

There's a serial killer thread running through the book. There's a gang war and vengeance drama played out from start to finish. There's a rambunctious love story, which goes through every shade of man-woman drama imaginable, and then some. There's chases, and gunfights, and riots, and tank wars in the streets, and drive by shootings as common as butter at breakfast, there's politics and political debate enough to keep a Senate House raging for weeks, there's history unloaded by the bucketful, there's individual stories woven through the larger fabric like colourful silk threads mingled into an already overdone pattern, and somehow Starling holds it all together, gathers up the slack, and keeps the whole afloat.

This is an epic of a novel, no doubt about it. It's a terrific novel about Russia, and a terrific love story, and a terrific social saga.

It's somewhat less effective as a crime novel, or as a serial killer thriller. But that's only in comparison. It's not that the crime story doesn't work--oh, it works amazingly well, with Starling able to conjure up backstory and motivations so effectively, you wonder if he had a sideline as a homicide investigator in Moscow as well as a serial killer! It's more that the crime story is like another book written into the larger book about Alice and Lev and the privatisation plotline.