Ludmila's Broken English

Book Review

DBC Pierre

Ludmila's Broken English is DBC Pierre's second novel. He won the Booker Prize as a dark horse in 2003 for his first novel, Vernon God Little.

This is the story of two improbable storylines, which of course eventually intersect.

Ludmila is a young woman in Ublisk, living with her family in virtual poverty, depending solely on the grandfather's pension to survive. When her grandfather tries to rape her in a field one day, Ludmila takes matters into her own hands – literally – and strangles him with her glove. Although her family is suspicious, they quickly mobilize to figure out how to guarantee the family's survival. In the end, they decide to sell the family's tractor and live off of the proceeds, while sending Ludmila to the nearest city to seek employment.

Bunny and Blair Heath are thirty-three-year-old men who, until recently, have been conjoined and living in a government home. The powers-that-be decide to separate them and ship them off to London to see if they can lead independent lives – get jobs, take care of themselves, meet people. Blair embraces the change, finds a job, and immediately starts trying to find intimacy with women. Bunny is more tentative, and begs Blair to remain close to him.

These two tales are improbably connected through Ludmila's appearance on a Russian bride web site.

Pierre can conjure up some interesting, one-of-a-kind descriptions, like this one of London:

“…a lurid juggernaut in its gran's old slippers. Somewhere in London 's gizzard stood a lever that drove it, but with no setting for fast or slow, no notch forward or back. Its welded lever read: Gone. Mind the fucking gap.”

The sum of all the interesting sentences, however, makes the writing sluggish and bloated, lacking the scintillating energy of a Rushdie sentence, or the promise hinted at with Vernon God Little. It does not appear that Pierre has anything insightful to say, but more that he wants to prove a futile point that he can say precisely whatever he wishes.

“Bunny's eyes fell. The sight of his body in the bath – a rippling white mouse on browned enamel – didn't invite reality's pea to its cup. What's more, a silkworm buoyed up from his pelvis, cheerful to be drowned.

He pulled some straggles of hair from his face, and peered through the doorway. Night's gravy was thinning. Although the basement's tiny street-level window was shut, its net curtain wavered, hovering air from the road: a road spread like toast with a Marmite of diesel soot and pigeon shit. Bunny tried to ignore the hoot of car alarms and sirens starting to rise like banshee cries across the borough. They unnerved him, made him mindful of the violent tangle around him, the city of lurid reflections on fetid tarmac, the hamster-wheel of never-quites. From what he'd seen of it, and the crossfire of air-kisses that drove it, 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. Just for Blair.

Bunny sighed.

He hunched like a grub in a bath in a basement of a city with a bosom not only big enough to support pan-pipe minstrels from Ecuador , but to suckle so many that some wore Red Indian costumes to gain a competitive edge. A world of children playing adults, and the adults playing children, a place too busy watching itself in the mirror to be bothered with the likes of him.”