Ludmila’s Broken English By D.B.C. Pierre, Faber, £ 6.50

D.B.C. Pierre’s Ludmila’s Broken English is, well, written in broken English. Perhaps this is exactly what the author intended, since his novel claims to be set in “post-modern”, translated as “post-post-f*****g-post” (whatever that means), times. While such a feat is undoubtedly glorifying for the author, it is a torture for the readers. Had Pierre spared some thought for his audience, he would have revelled in his accomplishments in solitude instead of leaving the readers to forage for meaning in the linguistic farrago he serves them with.

Considered in its outlines, the plot is quite hackneyed. It is the standard West-meets-East situation with each side discovering more similarities than differences in the other. In the glittering world of late-capitalist London, the National Health Service is being handed over to American companies, which are offering people drugs to suspend their conscience. As a result of that privatization, the conjoined twins, Blair and Gordon Marie-Heath, are separated at the age of thirty-three and released from Albion House, the state-owned institution that had cared for them from birth. They encounter the world outside Albion House with as much knowledge as that of a “toddler abandoned in hell”. It is in their vulnerability that they are at one with Ludmila Derev of Ublilsk, a war-ravaged republic of the erstwhile Soviet Union.

In Ublilsk, man is shown as living by and for bread alone, waiting eternally for the bread-train to arrive, because no other food is available. And then, most of them end up eating lead instead of bread. This panic-and-poverty-stricken land might appear very different from the plush Western countries, but both worlds are united in their ruthlessness towards the naïve and the gullible. Ludmila’s innocence may be “filthy and knowing”, but it is innocence nonetheless and it gives her poor protection from a brutal world. Suddenly finding herself on her own, she is as much at a loss as the Heath twins and it is fated that the three maladjusted entities would meet.

In a time that would not support tragedy, satire is the only possible way left to body forth a story like this. But satire becomes pointless when the object of ridicule, along with the plot, gets repeatedly lost in the tangle of words. The urges of the perpetually aroused Blair have “the flush of an angry mandrill’s arse”. The Derevs, making a show of mourning for Ludmila’s grandfather, “were a dark nativity, bleeding steam into a purple sky”.

Ludmila’s Broken English is a novel of missed chances. One cannot help feeling throughout the novel that the author will get at something better but no sooner are the expectations raised than they are drowned in a volley of contorted phrases. Going by the way the characters are brought into the scene and then forgotten, or the way in which the plot is forced into a deliberate climax, it seems that Pierre lost interest halfway through his creation. He compensated for the loss of inspiration by stuffing his novel with invectives. Those ardent admirers of Pierre, who are eager to discover here some trace of the talent which had won him the Booker Prize for his former novel, Vernon God Little, can perhaps find it in the expletives that seem to have been specially invented for this work. Phrases like “steam off my shit”, “generic noises of a gerbil” or “goose’s arse” are enough to preserve Pierre’s name as one of the most original inventors of swear words for posterity.