Here's my latest review, in all its broken-English glory...and though I know I'm not supposed to admit things like this, I hafta say that writing this review was a giggle.
I hope you're all well and, if you should live in/near Winnipeg, planning to attend the inaugural event in the newly minted Free Your Mind Reading Series this Saturday, April 15th.
Yours,
A.
* * *
Ludmilla's Broken English
by DBC Pierre
Faber & Faber, 318 pages, $25
It might help readers approaching Ludmilla's Broken English, DBC Pierre's follow-up to his Booker Prize-winning Vernon God Little, to know that the name "DBC Pierre" is as much a fiction as the contents of either of his two novels.
DBC stands for "dirty but clean," perhaps appropriate for an addict who once infamously sold his best friend's house while under the influence and pocketed the proceeds.
As it turns out, the acronym is also an apt description of the main characters of Pierre's flawed new novel, the formerly conjoined British twins Blair and Gordon-Marie ("Bunny") Heath, and the beautiful but brutal Ludmilla Derev, a resident of the fictitious former Soviet mini-republic Ublilsk.
At the novel's opening, the twins have just been surgically separated at the waist and set free in London after spending more than three decades institutionalized in northern England. Blair, the more physically vigorous of the pair, gets the lion's share of their conjoined libido but doesn't have the social skills to put it to good use, while the more intelligent and empathetic Bunny is uninterested in sex.
Our first glimpse of Ludmilla, on the other hand, shows her debating whether she should let her grandfather sodomize her in order to better persuade him to sign the voucher that will keep her family in food for another few days.
But instead of submitting, Ludmilla resists her pater familias' approaches and accidentally kills him. This means no more abuse but it also means no bread, forcing Ludmilla to travel to the nearest city to try to find work.
She is soon added to a website advertising mail-order brides. This is the point in the novel where Ludmilla's desire for something better meets Blair's desire for almost anything.
Since his release, Blair has bickered endlessly with Bunny about the point of modern life. He has also gotten a job with a London company that produces its goods in a Soviet factory.
And so, after catching a glimpse of Ludmilla online, he contrives a business trip to Ublilsk and also a meeting with her. Much hilarity (and carnage) ensues.
Unfortunately, contrived is just about the right word for this novel.
Blair, Bunny, and Ludmilla feel more like symbols for the struggle between globalization versus tradition than blood-and-bone people, unlike Vernon God Little's eponymous main character.
That novel was meant to satirize the North American media-induced mania for violence and consumption by focusing on a lumpy - and lumpen - boy in a small Texas town made momentarily famous by yet another high school massacre.
For all its howling clevernesses, however, it also contained a sympathetic portrait of a teenage boy straining towards some kind of truth.
In Ludmilla's Broken English, it seems as though the artist formerly known as Peter Finlay, like many literary sensations, is guilty of trying too hard to do something different.
And so, instead of continuing to mine the ridiculous yet tender territory of writers like Kurt Vonnegut and John Kennedy Toole, Pierre has created a bloody yet somehow bloodless story.
That is not to say the book is not without its pleasures. Any writer who is capable of passages such as this one, from the end of the novel, is not to be written off:
"When the sun flew clear of the horizon, it painted the haze with rectangular ducts of light. Some of these glanced off heads and shoulders, making hot photo-realism from a scene of faded impressions. As colour entered the room so did life, and all were lifted with it."In the end, as long as readers understand that Ludmilla's Broken English is all colour and very little life, they should come through the slaughter remarkably intact.
Ariel Gordon is a Winnipeg writer.
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