Thirty-three pages into Gadfly In Russia, and about the same number of miles into Russia, the “working-class” English author, at large in the motherland as a guest of the Writers' Union, “stopped at a modern cafeteria, providing bowls of rich borscht with meat and sour cream, bread cakes and bottles of cherryade”.

“Women at the next table in plain frocks and kerchiefs were tackling an enormous meal. Most diners were young men and girls in shirt-sleeves and summer dresses, and I thought how interesting it would be to speak to them”.

And the reader thinks how interesting it would be, for a few more pages at any rate, if this turned out to be a revival of that long-dead genre the fellow-traveller's wide-eyed 1960s postcard from the Soviet Union. It doesn't. Alan Sillitoe's relationship with Soviet Russians was long and affectionate, but he was never a drum-beater for Soviet Russia, nor wide-eyed as a writer. The result is a complex and sometimes hilarious study of wanderlust in the Intourist straitjacket.

It's more besides; Sillitoe brings the story up to date with a series of short chapters at the end, including one with a sting in its tail, and a poignant portrait of Homo sovieticus, brought low by the ravages of the oligarchs. But the real gadfly is the fortysomething Sillitoe, at a peak of curiosity and irreverence, circa 1967.

The road trip he undertook through Russia must be almost unique in the (admittedly limited) annals of Soviet road trips. Unlike Fitzroy Maclean's wild caper through the “Stans” before the war, this is a mainly law-abiding cruise on Intourist-approved routes from Leningrad to Romania, via Moscow and Kiev.

Traffic police come in for regular abuse, but the KGB features hardly at all. And, unlike later trips, such as those by Colin Thubron Among the Russians and many a departing Moscow correspondent, this was financed by royalties from Russian translations of the author's bestsellers. The money sits in Sillitoe's rouble savings account and cannot leave the country, so he comes to it, instead of vice versa, and lords it like an apparatchik for a month.

Something else sets this journey apart: instead of demonising his state-appointed minder, Sillitoe forms a lifelong friendship with him.

They race obnoxious Germans down the Moscow-Leningrad highway, swap foul language and tales of unbridled holiday libidos, and smoke fat Cuban cigars for 40 kilometres at a time.

The journey is breakneck: Sillitoe loves driving, even if it means bypassing Turgenev's birthplace. He is better at evoking era than place. But what an era. We should be glad this gadfly was taking notes.

Gadfly in Russia, by Alan Sillitoe

JR Books, £16.99

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