Faber £12.99 pp319

Born in Australia, brought up in Mexico, currently living in Ireland and masquerading under a vaguely French-sounding nom de plume, DBC Pierre is — one suspects deliberately — a difficult writer to place. He set his first novel, the Man Booker prize- winning Vernon God Little, in America, and the energetic and unruly Ludmila’s Broken English moves between a vaguely futuristic London, in which the threat of terrorism has led to curfews, and Ublilsk, a grim chip off the old Soviet bloc, “neither yet a country nor still a province” and overrun by troops from neighbouring Gnez.

In England, a pair of 33-year-old conjoined twins called Blair and Bunny Heath have just been separated and released from the institution in which they grew up. In Ublilsk, meanwhile, the young Ludmila plans to escape from a life of peasant drudgery in the Caucasus. This is a convergence-of-the-twain novel in which two apparently unrelated narratives eventually collide with catastrophic results.

Vernon God Little was widely praised for its inventive use of American vernacular, and Pierre certainly has a great deal of fun creating a cod-Russian idiom for Ludmila and her deranged peasant family. After a while, however, expressions such as “Cut your hatch!” and “Slap your cuckoo!” begin to pall. There is little respite for the reader back in London, where the Heath twins speak an English that is not so much inventive as geographically all over the place. The twins are supposedly from the north, and talk about having “a month’s laff in the Big Smoke”, but occasionally slide into something that sounds vaguely Glaswegian, digress into mockney, swerve into upper-class Edwardian and sometimes adopt current American usage. It is hard to imagine where we are when Blair says to his brother: “You’re the very devil, Buns. What’s gotten into you? You’re the lad, aren’t you? We’d do it, never mind.”

None of this would matter much if Pierre’s own narrative style was less fidgety. Given that so much fiction today is written in thoroughly dull English, it seems churlish to complain about linguistic exuberance, but Pierre too often gives the impression that his keyboard has simply run away with him. Describing Ludmila being punched in the face, for example, he writes: “A filament of blood flew wriggling through Ludmila’s lips, bright as a neon vein. She crumpled under it, falling to light the snow with her eyes.” This is lively writing, perhaps, but does not hold together syntactically (crumpled under what? the filament of blood?) or logically (how exactly could her eyes light the snow?). Similarly, the image of someone who “craned out of the bath like a badger” seems more beholden to onomatopoeia than to actual sense and, later on, tunnels connecting the London Underground system to Heathrow airport are likened with scant regard for physiology to “the vaginal tributaries of an old whore”.

Grotesque stylistic tics begin to grate on the reader. It is all too characteristic of Pierre’s writing that nobody in the novel merely looks at a person: Blair “hung a stare on his brother’s hair”, while Bunny in his turn “hung a dull eye on his brother”, then “curled an eye over his back like Quasimodo”. A few pages on, “one eye curled down like the feeler on a snail”, then, later, Bunny “wound his eyes up to Blair” and (yet again) “hung his eyeballs on Blair”. When eyes are not being hung or curled, they are being tossed about (“he threw an eye to the elder”, “she tossed her eyes to a crowbar”) or sliced (“he sliced his eyes into tiny leers”, “she sliced her eyes at Gregor”).

The overall effect is distracting and wearying, particularly when yoked to a helter-skelter narrative that occasionally seems as out of control as the language. Pierre hardly troubles to make his story in the least bit plausible, and the suggestion that the novel addresses such issues as globalisation and terrorism is risible. On the whole, however, he carries the reader with him by sheer effrontery. By the end of the novel, the stage is as strewn with corpses as Elsinore, although the experience of reading the book is more like playing a computer game than sitting through Shakespeare.

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