Two Brothers by Ben Elton: review A further complication is that both boys are in love with one girl, Dagmar, a Jewish princess as beautiful as she is capricious. In addition, there's Silke, the maid's daughter, a Communist in the making, not least because she's jealous of Dagmar. Over the course of the novel, Otto takes the place of Paulus, who takes the place of Otto, who is in love with Dagmar, who says she's in love with Otto, but then decides she's really in love with Paulus, who marries Silke, who is in love with Otto, who loves only Dagmar, who survives by pretending to be Silke. There are so many twists and turns that it becomes academic who is who, with whom and where. They are not people, they are mechanisms. They exist so Elton can give us a history lesson, and a very elementary one at that. "There were to be new laws," he writes in a chapter set in 1935. Laws that would formalise the anti-Semitic discrimination that was already central to German National Life. The Nuremberg Laws, as they came to be known. And as they are mere mechanisms, all the voices in Two Brothers sound the same, talking a kind of angry Eltonspeak circa Friday Night Live mixed with a grating Americanese more at home on the set of one his musicals. "This is a tough town in a tough world," says Frieda, without any hint of irony, and follows it later with, "I mean, pardon me, rabbi, no disrespect and all that but really..." Then there's Billy, the West Indian lover of the twin who escapes to London, who comes out with things like: "Do'an give me dat! You wasn't doin" it fo" your dad, you was doin" it cos o" dis girl" and "Amazing situation. I guess there's a lot of mixed-up stories dat got lost in the Holocaust. Not as amazing as the words Elton shoves into the mouths of his characters. Here's Silke on her first rally: "You just pee where you can... It might have been a triumph of will but it wasn't a triumph of plumbing." And not as amazing as the central, unexamined paradox of a Jewish boy so determined to protect the woman he loves that he will join the SS - how many Jews would he have killed as a storm trooper? Elton skirts the issue. For all the schematic twists and turns of the novel, it is at least possible to read it (generously) as a comment on the mutability of identity. But what does that Jewish boy in the SS tell us? Love makes it OK to betray your people? Now that truly is one mixed-up story. Two Brothers by Ben Elton 528pp, Bantam, t £18.99 (PLUS £1.35 p & p) Buy now from Telegraph Books (RRP £16.99, ebook £8.55)