Stuck on You

Conjoined twins set off to Eastern Europe in search of an online bride.

LUDMILA'S BROKEN ENGLISH

A Novel

By DBC Pierre

Norton. 326 pp. $24.95

Ludmila's Broken English is the worst novel I've read since DBC Pierre's debut novel, Vernon God Little . That nasty satire about the Columbine massacre won the Booker Prize and the Whitbread Award in 2003 during a fit of British tastelessness. Pierre, an Australian con man whose real name is Peter Finlay, took the pseudonym DBC as a play on his nickname: Dirty But Clean. Now Ludmila's Broken Engl ish presents a slightly different paradox: Dirty But Dull.

In alternating chapters, we follow two sets of characters. Blair and Gordon "Bunny" Heath are conjoined twins who have lived their entire lives in a state-run institution called Albion in England. (Like so much in this chaotic story, the allusion to Prime Minister Tony Blair and Chancellor of the Exchequer Gordon Brown is never consequential.) Under a newly privatized health service, officials decide that "one robust, independent life was better than two lives half-lived," and so the Heaths are surgically separated. But lo and behold, they both survive, and they're sent out into the modern world at the age of 33. Blair, the more physically robust one, is desperate to experience everything, particularly sex, while Bunny -- frightened, frail and asexual -- would rather escape the excitement of the city and return to Albion.

With these two naifs out on the town, there's plenty of potential for witty commentary on a culture grappling with the globalization of business and terror. But Pierre provides only meager hints of these themes. "The Heaths' collision with the new world," he writes, "was as shocking to behold as a lorry crashing into a pram." Actually, the twins barely make contact with the new world. Their only real adventure in London is a trip to a pub, which leads inexplicably to a job offer from a transnational corporation. The twins are provided with a male-enhancement drink mix and sent to Eastern Europe to evaluate women for the company's Internet-bride service.

Meanwhile, far away in the frozen, war-torn Russian Caucasus, a beautiful young woman named Ludmila Derev has finally grown so tired of being raped by her grandfather that she stuffs a glove down his throat and kills him. Unfortunately, this solution robs the family of its only source of income: Grandpapa's pension check. Facing starvation, they decide to sell their tractor and send Ludmila into the city to get a job at the propeller factory. Or the whorehouse. Whatever. She's tough, she's caustic, and she's got some fractured English she can parlay into a job (perhaps as a shameless imitator of Alex in Jonathan Safran Foer's Everything Is Illuminated ).

These parallel plot lines converge like railroad tracks -- at a point on the horizon that recedes before us as we trudge through a series of inane, repetitive arguments. Bunny and Blair bicker endlessly about how and how quickly they should plunge into the world:

" 'I'm not playing any more, Bunny. We're thirty-three. This is our first real crack at life and I'm sorry if I've given the impression I might spend it withering away with you, but I've heard a clock ticking and it bloody ticks for me.'

" ' Tolls for me.'