Double, double, toil and trouble
Stephen Abell
LUDMILA’S BROKEN ENGLISH by D. B. C. Pierre Faber, £12.99, pp. 318, ISBN 0571215181 ✆ £10.39 (plus £2.45 p&p) 0870 429 6655 The good news about this novel is that it is unlike anything you have read before; the bad news is that that is probably for a good reason. D. B. C. Pierre has followed up the Bookerwinning Vernon God Little (2003) with a picaresque tale of separated Siamese twins in a futuristic Britain, who come into contact with an internet bride from an imaginary exSoviet province. In doing so, he has committed the cardinal error of confusing oddness with originality, and we come to see that it is the manifest desperation to be credited with the latter that has pushed him regrettably towards the former.
The two plot strands are kept distinct for much of the book before coming together for its dénouement, like a structural reversal of the Siamese separation process. Blair and Bunny Heath are the conjoined twins, separated late in life, now powerlessly bickering like bland versions of Beckett characters, waiting for God knows what. Blair’s eagerness ‘to get his end wet’ leads the pair — for reasons too bemusing to set down — to an unscrupulous American businessman, who furnishes them with a priapic cocktail (emphasis very much on the first syllable) and packs them off to the Caucasus to find a bride. Meanwhile, in the town of Ublilsk, Ludmila leaves her poverty-stricken family to seek her eventual fortune on the internet. Her family lingers on, struggling to cope with the death of its patriarch (murdered while trying to anally rape Ludmila), and facing the pernicious inquiries of a government inspec tor. The result is more gaga than Gogol (we are given a full range of cod-Russian exclamations: ‘Smack your cuckoo!’; ‘Don’t toss gas!’; ‘You lay your mother’s bosom under fate’s pestle’ and so on) and the novel messily and violently subsides in a Slavic orgy of nonsense involving all of its central characters.
As will be clear, Pierre’s approach to comic writing is unembarassedly broad, like a fat person in a skimpy bathing costume. The novel is framed by two anal rapes (one incestuous) and by page 9 we are already acquainted with the ‘slickness’ of Ludmila’s ‘vulva’. That is not its central problem, however. The problem is that Pierre’s compositional method rests essentially upon an indefatigable determination to pursue quirkiness at all costs; he takes a tick-tack, as it were. For example, there is what might be termed the reverse Polaroid effect of his metaphorical writing: when you read a sentence, an identifiable image appears for about three seconds, and then fades to nothing as you pause to consider it. These are all from one page: ‘He burst upstairs like a suicide bomber.’ ‘The sight of his body in the bath a rippling white mouse on browned enamel — didn’t invite reality’s pea to its cup.’ ‘The city of lurid reflections on fetid tarmac, the hamster-wheel of never-quites.’ ‘He could easily imagine women’s loins also sported siren packs — mound-enhancing quim klaxons whose notes rasped or chirped the day’s pubic airs, just for fashion’s sake.’ Pierre is also fond of pointlessly synaesthetic descriptions, which are striking only like a slap to the forehead. Light, for example, is either solid (‘Spotlights hardened through the dark’) or fluid (‘butter sunlight bathed the shack’) or both in the same sentence: ‘A blade of light crossed the room to burn the edge of her curtain; she drew her curtain to splash herself in the light.’ There are other stylistic annoyances. Take the unnecessarily emphatic verbs: ‘Bunny molested his inside pocket for a Rothmans’; ‘the pair bullied a feral supermarket trolley’. Or the reported conversations, as Pierre manages to put the dire into both dialogue and dialect. Bunny, from the North of England, is given lines like, ‘Would it be on if I jammed a lardon up your bastard chuff?’. Or the American offers up, ‘Objectivity? My ass. There’s only consensual inter-subjectivity, Bob — and I say let’s play those dice, let’s burn ’em up’.
Certainly, the reader may wearily lay down the novel half way through, considering it more bookend than Booker. But it does, perhaps, reward persistence. Some positive things include: the occasionally genuine Polaroid moments (Ludmila’s ‘stabbing green eyes like spears of young bamboo’; a trendy bar ‘asquirm with floaty-type people so contorted by casualness that they seemed driven by internal gusts of wind’); the fact that the writing does settle down slightly as the story progresses; and that this is indisputably, which is increasingly rare, a novel novel. Smack your cuckoo, as Ludmila’s family might say.
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