"We're at the edge of England , looking out onto a poorer world," one of the protagonists of DBC Pierre's new novel claims as he embarks on his first trip into Europe , "a world without bacon." One of the primary goals of the playfully eccentric Ludmila's Broken English is to examine the supposed global society that we are entering in the twenty-first century, particularly through the collision of disparate people and lifestyles in modern Europe . Frequently this study requires characters to have a limited scope, dietary or otherwise, through which the problems of the contemporary West can be understood. However, Pierre 's heroes are not alone in espousing a British provincialism and a sometimes close-minded worldview.

Pierre 's latest work reads like a typical second novel, probably even to those unfamiliar with his first. Although the surprising and unconventional Vernon God Little won the Man Booker Prize in 2003, Ludmila is a stumbling attempt to recreate the unexpected success of its predecessor. The moments at which the effort is truly engaging and witty exist in a rarefied air, surrounded and saturated by weak but earnest scenes that do very little to prop up the basic conceits on which the author muses.

Some of these conceits, though, are fantastically worthwhile. Pierre sets up two storylines in the novel's introduction, then allows them to wind and wend slowly—indeed, too slowly—until they meet and become entangled. This slow process towards integration is the writer's view of our contemporary global community. In England , the conjoined twins Blair and Bunny Heath are separated at age 33, then left to fend for themselves in London as cantankerous and maladjusted adults. Meanwhile, in the fictional Caucasian war zone of Ublilsk, a peasant girl named Ludmila seeks an idealized Western existence far from her poverty-stricken family. Moving gradually towards the inevitable cultural collision and consequent cultural union, Pierre places a variety of modern-day economic and social barriers in front of his characters. These include the broken morality of a multinational corporation specializing in nightclubs, cocktails, and Russian brides, the difficulties of adapting to the melting pot of modern London , and the narcissism of minor differences encountered among warring fledgling states.

All these tangential flights of fancy in the plot are implicitly entertaining, but they do not successfully cohere for the most part, and Pierre 's book quickly falls into an earnest but unmoving formula. Nearly every chapter revolves around facile arguments between at least two of the various characters, used by the author only to exercise his ideas—and sadly, these characters, though imaginative, are never truly appealing. Many of the debates end up sounding like a single voice that tries to fight with itself, but only sets up straw men for itself to combat. When the British twins debate conflicting urges to engage with or to hide away from the world, their witticisms as well as their arguments turn bland and platitudinous:

'Well, I mean, this is the state of play in the world, you can't just cower away. We have to get involved, exercise our rights, stamp out the scourge of terrorism. I'm sorry if it's not soothing.'

'Be a good lad, then—after you've stamped out tourism, can you grab us a pork pie and a bottle of Gordon's at Patel's?'

Pierre 's bent towards surreal conceits and juxtapositions (Siamese twins and Balkan mail-order brides, most prominently) is in itself very entertaining, though in Ludmila it is hardly enough to carry out the literary project at hand. Although Bunny and Blair may act as a humorous portrayal of differing perspectives from post-imperialist England , one ultimately gets more from musing on the idea of the characters than from actually watching them play out their fairly thin story. Spoken flatly and without credibility, the characters' constant dialogue does little to flesh out what would be the core of a stronger novel—essentially, the realization of conflicting points of view that together encapsulate the modern European environment.

Midway through the novel, the surreal fantasia explodes into an evanescent dance scene in a scintillating twenty-first-century nightclub. The now-separate brothers dance "their own species of tango... with edges as sharp as blades," forming a new art out of their prior organic unity. However, the vision ends, and the characters must navigate a series of uninteresting arguments and minor turns before reaching the climax of their adventure through the new Europe .

This final scene is, unfortunately, the only other moment at which Pierre 's creativity seems to find an appropriate conduit. United with Ludmila through a set of not-unobvious events, the twins face what may be seen as the ultimate dissolution of an older (twentieth-century) English way of life. This symbolic break with the past operates through a highly grotesque scene that may not warrant its own violence. The extreme juxtaposition here of violent destruction and creative reproduction implies the necessity of a purging rite before this new world can proceed—the old Europe must undergo upheaval and imaginative reconstitution in order to enter the new century. The question for the reader, then, is whether such purgation is applicable to our own world, or whether it is simply Pierre 's way of extricating himself from a tumultuous series of events.

The novel's efforts to encapsulate, or at least bear witness to, modern European culture(s) also seem somewhat hit-or-miss. The evocations of London are frequently resplendent, whirlwind impressions, bringing together a history of literary depictions of the city with a surreal and even bawdy voice.

For that was the city's speed. A lurid juggernaut in its gran's old bloomers. 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 British voice is further amplified in the exchanges between Bunny and Blair, who use modern English terminology (from "arse" and "bloody" to "tossers" and "Ribena,") as if to distinguish slang as a fecund, site-specific cultural artifact, not the sterile international language of politics and business.

Pierre goes to great lengths to give a sense of the colloquial, but his conjurings of the peoples of the Caucasus prove poor caricatures more often than adroit readings. Ludmila and her family in the fictional Ublilsk province converse in frequently combative aphorisms, which carry with them a Slavic creativity but also evoke a Westerner's poor sense of Eastern European culture and speech. Even in the first chapter, one of Ludmila's relatives claims that her lover, Misha, has a girl's name—a typical Western misunderstanding of a male patronymic. The flights of fantasy may allow for disingenuous representations of culture, but the ignorance of Pierre 's writing in such instances undoes all of his efforts to validate the newly-transformed postcolonial Englishman.

Ludmila proudly displays its own experimental ambitions—describing a surreal culture that is still coming into being, and erecting an international fantasia with a wealth of intelligent, creative possibilities. However, this pomposity overlooks the need for a stronger plot and narrative structure. DBC Pierre's imaginative vision deserves conditional praise, though, and his ambition to encompass a broad, international world full of irreconcilable complexity and diversity will continue to grow and develop if he keeps to his current projects. In light of the intellectual and literary capacities that the author displays, Ludmila's Broken English may one day be an intriguing stepping-stone on Pierre 's path towards stronger literary endeavors.

 

Jay Deshpande '06 will have to head down to Montreux in time for dinner.