Back in the USSR

Set between the former Soviet Union and London, DBC Pierre's latest offering is fabulously manic but, as Sophie Harrison writes, it lacks the qualities that made Vernon God Little a Booker Prize-winning readIt seems a long time since anyone has taken the former Soviet republics seriously. Recent novels by Jonathan Safran Foer and Gary Shteyngart have been, frankly, rude about the emancipated nations. The British comedian Sacha Baron Cohen has been ruder. After the ghastly birth of Ali G, Cohen cooked up another character, Borat, a Kazakh citizen of such naked sexism and anti-Semitism – and furthermore, so unabashed a peasant – that the Kazakh government has lowered itself to making a complaint. But Borat and his novelistic counterparts hail not so much from Kazakhstan as from Loserstan, a land of walleyed grandmothers, ugly yet optimistic men, mutilated English and tractors (as the pickle factory was to Indian literature in English ten years ago, so the tractor is to Loserstani literature now). Western nations may not have been 100 per cent united in the face of the Soviet threat, but they certainly know where they stand when confronted with an un-ironic mullet.

DBC Pierre's new novel takes the hallmarks of Loserstani literature and flogs them to pieces. Ludmila's Broken English is divided between a benighted shred of the former Soviet Union called ‘Ublilsk- Kuzhniskia' and London, which comes off not much better. The writing is fabulously manic. In Pierre's first novel, the Man Booker Prize-winning Vernon God Little, the energy was focused by the first-person narration and an assured sense of place. Ludmila is no less high-spirited, but this time Pierre discards such constraints, setting the action in two locations while trying to animate several characters simultaneously.

In the East, the cast consists of Ludmila, a cute Ublilski girl, and her Comedy Peasant relatives. Ludmila has green eyes, pretty hair and what this reader feels are unusual breasts (“with nipples like tiny dog-snouts quivering up”). Ludmila's pulchritude is relevant, since many of the men she encounters sexually harass her. Indeed, it is her grandfather's attempt to sodomize her that resolves her  to escape and seek her fortune in the West. She is not, initially, fixed on Britain – perhaps understandably, as London's transport network resembles “the vaginal tributaries of a lovely old whore” – but the plot labours to fix this.

The British end of the story concerns a set of conjoined twins, Blair Albert and Gordon-Marie Heath, who grew up in an institution somewhere in the north of England and have finally been separated at the age of 33. After the operation, they have been sent by unnamed powers to London, where – deep satire! – Blair has become a polenta-loving fan of the free market, while Gordon has retained his unreconstructed northern ways. But despite the separation, they are still profoundly interdependent. There doesn't seem much reason for their existence other than this one clunking joke. Freed from conjoinedness, Blair wants to have sex, which is how the distant geographies of the plot are finally dragged together. What better way for Ludmila to escape her muddy homeland than by becoming Blair's mail-order bride? The plan fails, but not before it has provided enough feeble momentum to get the brothers over to Ublilsk, where the novel collapses into a denouement that would be revolting if it weren't so excessive.

As the title suggests, Ludmila does not speak English very well. Neither do her relatives. But, there is a flaw in Pierre's comic interpretation of the funny way foreigners talk, which is that Ludmila, her mother, her brother and her grandmother are not meant to be speaking to one another in English; they're meant to be speaking ‘Ubli', in which it is only fair to presume they are fluent. Why, then, do they discourse in BabelFish? Being from Loserstan, they mostly confine themselves to insult, anyway. “Smack your cuckoo!” “Cut your spastic hatch.” “Wake up the bird in your head!”

Back in Britain, the I-can't-put-my- finger-on-who-they-remind-me-of brothers don't do much better. Gordon talks in a mixture of music-hall cockernee and Scottish slang: One minute he's complaining, “Me chest's a bit dicky.” The next he's describing children as “bairns” and addressing his brother as “pal”. Blair's voice is much the same as his brother's, which is just conceivably intended as further satirical irony, though it seems unlikely. Vernon God Little also spoke a crazy, personalised dialect, but his speech had lovely internal consistency: it belonged to him, and only to him. Blair and his brother, by contrast, are given dialogue out of a Guy Ritchie movie.

The weirdest aspect of this linguistic chaos is that the author himself seems to have lost control of his native tongue. No body part is safe from the awful ambition of metaphor. Hair blows “stiff like dead lawn”, eyebrows pop “like crusts of toast”, a face becomes a “scornful penis”. Eyes have a particularly rough time: why confine yourself to looking at a fellow when you can “hang a stare” or “beach a fat eye” on him instead? Why not have your eyes become “finger holes in a dumpling” or “sharpen into cuts”? Once your nipples have become puppies' noses, you've pretty much lost touch with certain healthful literary conventions. “May as well be hanged for a goose as a mouse,” you can almost hear Pierre thinking. “Best tractor on!”

All in all, none of it, to use Pierre's own Sufi formulation, really invites “reality's pea to its cup”. It is a very sad thing to report, but this novel, unlike its predecessor, does not work. DBC Pierre: wake up the bird in your head!

©2006 The New York Times