Far from home

fiction Far from home Ludmila's Broken English DBC Pierre Faber & Faber, 318pp, �12.99

At the height of 1950s all-American fervour, US scientists released studies claiming that children raised in a multilingual environment were less mentally stable than their monolingual peers. By these standards, DBC Pierre (born to British parents and raised in Mexico, Australia and the US) was doomed to crazy outsiderdom from the start, which made the perfect pitch of Vernon God Little, his Booker-winning satire of Southern-fried Americana, all the more remarkable. In Ludmila's Broken English, on the other hand, Pierre goes back to his multifarious roots, unleashing a globalised Babel in which everyone is slightly unhinged and no one is quite at home.

What drags them away from home - as Pierre, a good tax exile himself, knows - is the irresistible gravity of market forces. In a vaguely futuristic Britain where "everything has been privatised", recently separated Siamese twins are cast out of the cosy Albion House Institution to fend for themselves in London. The oh-so-ironically named Blair and Gordon (aka Bunny) Heath are symbiotic opposites: while Blair is slick, aspirational and desperate to immerse himself in as many new experiences - and new women - as possible, Bunny is dour, disillusioned and yearns only for the familiar corridors of Albion House.

Meanwhile, in the war-torn land of the Caucasus, the beautiful Ludmila Ivanova Derev escapes being sodomised by her grandfather to seek out a living for her shack-dwelling family. Via the American playboy owner of the NHS and an internet dating agency, the three protagonists collide in Ublilsk, with gruesome results.

This is all as self-consciously farcical - and as patchily diverting - as it sounds. But while the novel's plot goes global, its language goes postal. Untethered from the Salinger/Kerouac/South Park first-person narrator of Vernon God Little, Pierre's prose splinters into a clamour of competing idioms. First off - and here Pierre shows more of his hand than he intends - is straight-faced lyricism: the twins' nurse "whisked folds of dusty light around them"; Ludmila, in a near prose-poem, "should've sensed trouble's nest was made". This, you feel, is Pierre's attempt to show himself to be A Great Writer. At these points the virtuosity worn so lightly in Vernon God Little descends into straining for effect.

But the tone is lightened by the novel's great comic innovation - the salty vernacular spoken by its collection of grotesques and degenerates in their Caucasus mountain hideaway. Ubli, Pierre tells us, "is the language most exquisitely tailored to the expression of disdain", and he cooks up an unwholesome stew of insults - "smack your cuckoo", "cut your filthy hole", "keep your filthy lies in your arse" - interspersed with invigorating threats such as "I will bolt the cheeks of your arse to the backs of different trains". It's the same gag Jonathan Safran Foer played in Everything Is Illuminated, shorn of the whimsy and fired up on homebrew and antifreeze, and it powers Ludmila's misadventures a treat.

Blair and Bunny's collision with "postpostmodern Britain" appears flaccid in contrast, partly because it labours under Pierre's weirdly off-key conception of our island. His fulminations against "sex before breakfast before jetting away on air miles", "the dreams of New Britannia, a mad-for-it merry-go-round of effortless cool and truth" and villas in Fuengirola sound like Norman Tebbit in full flow. Pierre's favourite running joke hinges on Blair's passion for arugula, goat's cheese and jam�n serrano, repeatedly deflated by Bunny's laconic demands for scotch eggs, bacon baps and Smarties. It's all oddly 1997 and, worse, imprecise. Decent satire knows its target inside out. Pierre's Britain sounds as if it's been dreamt up by someone who's spent the past three years halfway up an Irish mountain.

But like many satirists, Pierre is also an unreconstructed sentimentalist. The Ublis' familiarity with violent death and sub-zero temperatures renders them pretty much Rousseauvian savages: as the city-slicker twins stumble after Ludmila through the Caucasian snows, they discover that "while the tendrils of her being were entwined close to the basic rod of her spirit, their rod was bare". In other words, third-world poverty ennobles while western wealth corrupts. To serve this dubious proposition, Pierre's characters are too often reduced to ciphers: an American can say only "We hold the franchise on freedom, Bobby"; an exploited peasant girl "There must be more choices than munitions or sex". The studenty politics are a falling-off from the high points of foul-mouthed, hilarious invention. Pierre has a miraculous ear, but until he has found his plot, he should probably cut his hatch.