FICTION: MAX MCGUINNESSreviews Lights Out in WonderlandBy DBC Pierre Faber and Faber, 315pp. £12.99
THE ACADEMIC Gabriel Josipovici rattled a few ink wells in July with his strident denunciation of the conformism and conservatism of contemporary English literature. Writers such as Ian McEwan, Salman Rushdie and Martin Amis are, he told the Guardian, "just like prep-school boys showing off"; their writings may be well crafted, he claimed, but they lack the ambition and originality of their modernist forebears.
By contrast, though DBC Pierre's third novel, Lights Out in Wonderland,may not quite distinguish him as the heir to Joyce and Eliot, it is so deliriously bonkers that the likes of Josipovici ought to applaud the Leitrim resident's chutzpah. Where most writers draw on some variant of the free, indirect style inherited from Flaubert, Pierre adopts a jagged, first-person perspective, piling up great chunks of messy prose. Where others strive for subtlety, Pierre subjects us to long, inchoate footnotes about the evils of consumer society. Cumbersome speeches about nostalgia for life in communist East Germany (known as " Ostalgie") abruptly barge their way into pieces of dialogue. And apparently no simile is too awkward or preposterous for Pierre: "My hair crests over my head like the dying wave of capitalism, moulded by an aircraft seat."
He is equally indifferent to the demands of verisimilitude. The plot, such as it is, follows a young anticapitalist activist named Gabriel Brockwell, who escapes from rehab in England and promptly absconds to Tokyo with his comrades’ funds and a pocketful of class-A drugs. After his best friend, a South African gastronomical wunderkind, causes a lethal mishap in a fugu restaurant, Gabriel hurries to Berlin to organise a Caligulaesque bacchanal beneath the soon-to-be-closed Tempelhof airport, which is somehow supposed to bring about his friend’s release from a Japanese jail. Along the way we encounter people with names like “Thomas Georg Philip Frederick Florian von Brandenburg Stendhal Saxe fuck-knows-even-what-else” and “Didier le Basque”, who all take a lot of drugs and say things like: “A little socialist? My friend, when it comes to ass on plastic, no girl is a socialist. Give it rich leather and the panty falls off.”
As for the narrator, while we may get little in the way of characterisation, he records the contents of his schnozz in lyrical detail: “After painstaking excavation I manage to pull out a diamantine latticework sleeve, a perfect little cast of my nostril, still candied with cocaine and set with tiny rubies of blood. I pop it into my mouth and jolt into the day.” Just the sort of epiphany you tend to get after a night out in Drumshanbo, I suppose.
Pierre's scatological proclivities will be familiar to those who have read his Booker Prize-winning debut, Vernon God Little. But whereas Vernon's foul mouth could be interpreted as the true voice of a pissed-off Texan teenager, Lights Out in Wonderlandtakes a leap in portraying the whole of human civilisation as essentially puerile and incapable of controlling its basest appetites. What redemption there may be comes in the form of a banker-filled private jet sabotaged by a bag of fireworks.
Such pessimistic pyrotechnics in both narrative and style are hardly unprecedented. David Foster Wallace and Thomas Pynchon have clearly been formative influences, and the book often reads like a Eurotrash version of Hunter S Thompson's Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.However, each of these three writers retains some commitment to the sublime, whereas Pierre's style is so gratuitously rebarbative that it is as if the very concept of beauty has been irredeemably tarnished.
The only time we glimpse anything like aesthetic transcendence is in the precisely-detailed recipes that the author has pasted into the narrative towards the novel’s close. And, in a deeply macabre flourish, these describe dishes of extraordinary culinary imagination and skill, each of which has as a main ingredient the flesh of some highly endangered species.
The guests at the Tempelhof banquet thus begin with a course of “Kiwi Hummingbird Broth with Porcini Agnolotti Leeks”, followed by “Western Fanshell Muesel Soufflé with Black Rhino Horn” and “Olive Ridley Turtle Necks in Parmesan and Brioche Crumbs”. The suggestion that the international elite is so jaded that it can only get its kicks by gorging on increasingly obscene delicacies is doubly wry, as it is at once literally true – witness the recent French ban on eating the prized ortolan songbird – and an apt metaphor for capitalism’s locust-like tendencies.
However, this is one of the few real jokes in a novel that, for the most part, subjects the reader to a diet of indigestible dialogue and horribly underdone exposition. This book will leave you groaning and grinding your teeth rather than guffawing.
It is not clear that Lights Out in Wonderlandsucceeds on any commonly accepted level: the story is bewildering, the characters one-dimensional and the writing mostly turgid. Yet it also seems obvious that this is as much as Pierre intends, joining a long line of writers, beginning with Baudelaire, who have made sport out of alienating the reader. By cocking a snook at all our preconceptions of what a novel should be, Lights Out in Wonderlandfirmly establishes itself as an experimental anti-novel. It certainly ain't pretty, but if Josipovici was right to diagnose a sclerosis in contemporary letters, then Pierre's work stands out as a none-too-eloquent counter-example. For here is a trivial, grim and solipsistic novel that precisely reflects the triviality and solipsism of our grim times.
Max McGuinness is a faculty fellow at the department of French and Romance philology at Columbia University
