DBC (Dirty But Clean) Pierre (real name Peter Finley) won
several literary awards with his debut novel, Vernon God Little, The
Booker Prize being one of them. He also won the Whitbread (as it was called
then) First Novel award. The novel had attracted mixed reviews, if I recall
correctly. I don’t remember much of the novel, which read once it became
available in paperback other than that it took me a while to get into it, but,
once I did, I enjoyed it thoroughly; I thought the novel was very funny.
What I also recall about Vernon God Little is was
an easy enough novel to read. Which, Pierre’s third novel, Lights Out in Wonderland,
isn’t.
The protagonist of Lights Out in Wonderland is
twenty-five-year old Gabriel Brockwell, the only child of middle-class,
divorced, British parents. His father, before he took to Capitalism ‘like a
paedophile’, had travelled to Germany
after the collapse of the German Democratic Republic (GDR), and, in the company
of an East German, had run a club called Pego in the former East Berlin. When
the novel opens we meet Gabriel in a private rehab, where he is admitted with
his father’s money, determined to take his discharge so that he can commit
suicide. Why does Gabriel want to kill himself? Gabriel wants to kill himself
because he is disillusioned. Gabriel is anti-Capitalist, and is heavily
involved in anti-Capitalist activism in the company of others who purport to
loathe Capitalism with the same fervour as he. Except that they don’t, really,
and are treating this enterprise as a way to earn money; which, to Gabriel’s
horror, it does. So Gabriel is going to kill himself; but not just yet. He
wants to have one last hurrah, the mother of all bacchanals (a word that gets
repeated in the novel several times), before he removes himself from the human
pool. He then flies to Japan, having siphoned off money from the account of his
anti-capitalist organization—much to the disgust of his colleagues, all of whom,
as we have seen, Gabriel regards as fraud, for they have accumulated money for
the anti-Capitalist organization, using capitalist methods. Why Japan? Because
Japan is where Gabriel’s childhood friend, a South African called Nelson Smuts,
who has become a genius chef, a hybrid of Gordon Ramsay and Heston Blumenthal,
works as a chef in the kind of restaurant where the likes of me would have to
take out a second mortgage for an evening’s meal. Smuts, if it is possible, is
even wackier than Gabriel. The hoity-toity Japanese restaurant Smuts works in specialises
in barely legal (probably illegal) haute cuisine such as poisonous offal and
ovaries of blowfish which, if you miscalculate the proportions (as Smuts does),
and serve the wrong organ, can kill the diners instead of imparting delicious
tingling to their lips. When the two rabble-rousers meet they waste little time
in getting wasted on industrial quantities of cocaine and alcohol. The
inevitable happens. Smuts serves the wrong fish or the wrong organ of the fish
to one of the customers—a gangster, no less—who dies. This lands Smuts in
prison facing charges of first degree murder, and Gabriel on his way to Berlin
where he once lived as a child, in search of his father’s former business
partner when the two of them ran Pego. Gabriel has been led to believe by his
father that he did not cash in his part of the business when he returned to
England from Berlin, and, technically, the German partner, Gerd, owes him
money. Gabriel believes that through his contact with the partner, he would be
able to host another bacchanal for the mysterious Frenchman Didier Le Basque,
who specialises in arranging decadent parties for the uber-rich (read bankers
and financiers) of such uber-decadence the likes of which are beyond the
imaginations of you and me who think eating in Michele Rouex Junior is the
height of sophistication. (How would arranging a decadent party at his father’s
former club save Smuts? Don’t ask me. We are invited to consider that Le Basque
is the provider of the illegal fish to the Japanese restaurant and, since the
man has acquired outlandish wealth by arranging outlandish bacchanals with
outlandish gastronomic themes for outlandishly rich clients at outlandish
venues, he would be loath to part with the services of the outlandishly
talented Nelson Smuts.)
In the Berlin section, the novel becomes less surreal
than—though as absurd as—the Tokyo section. Gabriel manages to locate Gerd in
the about-to-be-closed Tempelhof airport. It turns out that Gerd owes Gabriel’s
father nothing; it was, in fact, Gabriel’s father who fleeced Gerd off money
and then legged it to England. Gabriel, despite hiccoughs (such as the
disastrous night out with a German aristocrat—Le Basque’s middle man in German—,
a couple of whores, and a basinful of illicit drugs), is, nevertheless, able to
arrange the greatest bacchanal ‘since the fall of Rome’ with Le Basque’s money
and contacts, which includes delicacies (the novel gives recipes, so the
interested readers, if they have the means, could try them out) such as
‘caramelised milk-fed tiger cub’, ‘confit of Koala leg with lemon saffron
chutney’, or ‘golden lion tamarin brain with blue cheese ravioli’; and the piece de resisatnce, ‘olive ridley
turtle necks in parmesan and brioche crumbs’, the turtles, whose necks go into
the delicious, mouth-watering recipe, being more than hundred year old
protected species from Madagascar, from where Le Basque has smuggled them.
Lights Out in Wonderland, if it is a proof of anything, is the
proof of how outrageously imaginative DBC Pierre is. The blurb on the hardback
edition I read described the novel as ‘a sly commentary on these End Times and
the entropic march towards insensate banality’. That’s about right, I think,
even though I do not fully understand what it means. As you read the novel you
can’t make up your mind whether the prose reflects the entropic banality (the
words ‘nimbus’, ‘limbo’ and bacchanal’ appear on every other page) or is brilliant.
I voted, in the end in favour of brilliance. The sentence structures are
unusual, the choice of words interesting—all of which go on to give a kind of
surreal feel to the narrative, which, I think, was the author’s intention. At
times Pierre overdoes it (there is a section of the novel where the word nimbus
appears in every second line), but, on the whole, it works. Just about.
