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 dbc pierre interview
 to access audio and video on collective you need real player.Vernon God Little’s Russian cousin. “I’m a beginner,” says a crumpled, hungover DBC Pierre sitting in a book-stuffed room at his publisher’s London offices. Somehow the statement doesn’t feel like false modesty despite the fact that the beginner in question won the Man Booker for his debut, Vernon God Little, a satirical assault on celebrity-obsessed society, American hubris and capital punishment. But did its tremendous success throw Pierre off his game? While new book Ludmila’s Broken English might attract accusations of a broad-brush approach to plotting and character, Pierre is quick to offer a sturdy defence of his work.  “Traditionally, fiction writers seem to have felt the duty to bury their symbols deeply and to make them subtle,” he says. “And also to spend a lot of time crafting the work for plausibility and credibility.” But trying to make his near-future story of recently separated conjoined twins, Blair and Gordon Heath, colliding with Russian internet bride Ludmila in the fictional war-torn Caucasian republic of Ublilsk appear realistic would have been dishonest, he says. “It’s like we’ve hit a phase now where the kind of realism we expect from life exists only in fiction. And I didn’t know if I’d be abetting a delusional state by spending a lot of time to create that parallel reality we’ve gotten used to in books and the cinema and what have you.” Dealing with globalization, the west’s exploitation of the Third World and the police state we might shortly be living in, the novel doesn’t bother with niceties. “We think that for the smell of a quid Ludmila might lay down at our feet and do everything we want,” Pierre says, while from her perspective “she just has to stay alive and try not to be raped too often, and try and keep her family alive.”  It’s bleak stuff, but darkly humorous, too. The chief pleasure of reading Pierre’s work lies in its sardonic tussling with global lunacy; that and the crackling inventiveness of his language. But was the novel’s political comment his main reason for writing it? “No. I’m not politically active, but the arguments interest me, and they ended up in the book because I can’t get away from the bloody arguments. It’d be another dishonest thing - even if I wrote a crime novel, any kind of thing that was contemporary - it would be dishonest to stop this constant barrage of argument infecting the work.” With all this dissatisfaction and anger bubbling up through his work, is it hard for him to get up in the morning and write? “I don’t get up in the morning and write,” he laughs. “The days are given over to hygiene and administration and nutrition, stuff that’s really unimportant in the history of the world. It’s not till everyone’s gone to bed that the world’s a blank canvas again and you can run with the ball without anyone watching. It seems to be in the spirit of why we’re here that I should steal away with this stuff in the night and see where it goes.”
Chris Power
Ludmila’s Broken English by DBC Pierre, out now published by Faber.
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