Ludmila's Broken English
by DBC Pierre
Faber & Faber, $188
In his debut novel, Vernon God Little, DBC Pierre took J.D. Salinger's ur-teenager and updated him for the 21st century in the form of Vernon Gregory Little, a hapless Texan teenager wrongfully accused of a school massacre.
Vernon's voice was teeming with vulgar aphorisms, observations and metaphors that had never been seen in the pages of a Booker Prize-winning novel before. Most importantly, the book had a crude honesty and wisdom that stood out in a literary scene populated by polite and elegant novels.
Although Pierre made his name on the literary scene as a purveyor of literary vulgarism, Ludmila's Broken English is distinctly different from his debut in its temper and intensity. The book is composed of two separate strands of narrative set in opposite ends of the European continent: half in an ambiguously futuristic England overrun by rampant privatisation and the spectre of terrorism, and half in the fictional region of Ublilsk, 'a compacted heap of dung and snow ... neither yet a country nor still a province' somewhere in the war-torn Caucasus.