Bribes, bickering and backhanders

The decrepitude of old age is a piteous sight and subject. In his second book Michael Honig — a doctor-turned-novelist and sharp observer of the body’s frailties, and the mind’s — zanily explores it through the imagined senility of Vladimir Putin, once supremely powerful, now struggling to tie his laces. The horror, sadness and momentary furies of dementia are all traced in Vladimir’s plight, plus the tedium and — especially — the bleak comedy. As the story opens, he is visited by his successor: ‘I’m going to fire that bastard,’ he says. ‘Have we got cameras?’ On a lakeside walk he strips off for phantom paparazzi. These fiascos are parodies of a parody, the actual Putin’s macho antics themselves being a pantomime of statecraft, staged with an invisible wink, as Honig’s send-ups help you to see.

The conceit is that, after serving five terms as president and two as prime minister, Vladimir is confined to a dacha outside Moscow. He is diligently nursed by Sheremetev, a sort of holy fool and possibly the most honest man in Russia, whose probity has ‘earned him only laughter and contempt’. The patient’s short-term recall has evaporated, but, as they often are, his distant memories are undimmed, in his case involving wars (he has annexed part of Belarus), assassinations and rigged elections. Sheremetev tactfully doesn’t listen to his ramblings about kickbacks and shake-downs, just as he is unaware of the orgy of graft his dacha colleagues are conducting: ‘Like fish gorging themselves on a whale’s flesh even while the whale was still alive.’

Two developments shock him from his innocence. War erupts between Stepanin the cook — a fine comic creation almost as profane as Vladimir, who is trying to amass the capital to open a ‘Russian fusion’ restaurant — and the housekeeper over mark-ups on poultry supplies.