The Decadents Fight Back
September sees publication of Lights Out in Wonderland, DBC Pierre’s third novel; in some ways the concluding fiction in what he has referred to as an End Times Trilogy. Faber editor Lee Brackstone explores the relationships between the three titles, and author DBC Pierre discusses his latest novel.
Reality is a lottery of horror whose chaos led humans to develop an alternate world of hope and plans. Human existence is what we do in the gap between those worlds. All joy and failure arise from managing that fragile duality – and unhappiness from trying to live too far above horror. Life is most bountiful when we stay low and expect little. As with limbo: decide to die – then live. But protect your gap, as regimes will seize it to fill with their ideas, controlling your fears for their gain – and none more than commerce, assuring us we’re different, and should expect more. This evening’s vital message then: Mind the Gap.
September sees publication of Lights Out in Wonderland, DBC Pierre’s third novel; in some ways the concluding fiction in what he has referred to as an End Times Trilogy. The three novels are ostensibly unrelated; what links them is style and sensibility. Vernon God Little, conceived and written in advance of the Columbine massacre, is a high-wire satirical farce set in Texas, relating the (mis)adventures of 15-year-old Vernon on the run from the law, and a world turned to hate, vengeance and sloth. The criminally overlooked (at the time of publication at least, with Pierre on the crest of a Man Booker wave about to crash on Realism’s shores) Ludmila’s Broken English imagines the release of two recently separated conjoined twins, Blair and Gordon, and their trip into a war-ravaged Caucasian backwater. Pierre’s high baroque prose, his fearless and deliberately unsubtle allegorical picaresque, served as an Eastern response to Vernon’s version of a flatulent West, increasingly depicted as ‘an old bitch gone in the teeth’ – to quote Ezra Pound, a poet and theorist who delighted in smashing through linguistic barriers and making enemies of the establishment in the first half of the twentieth century.
Lights Out in Wonderland takes as its setting, London, Tokyo and Berlin – and an earlier version of the novel (the original draft of which ran to over 800 pages) – included chapters set on the Galapagos Islands. As someone who grew up in Mexico, with an Australian birth certificate and British parents, now resident in Ireland, Pierre’s fiction is truly global: his imagination is fired by the degradation, perversions and abuses that dominate the narrative of these times, whether it be the circumstances around mass murder and the perverse celebrity this can bring, or a character’s pursuit of pleasure to the cost of all else around him.
Lights Out completes a loose trilogy with this very character in the shape of Gabriel Brockwell, a poet in his mid-twenties, who comes to the realisation in rehab that in a world, and with humanity, so in thrall to capitalism, there is only one true choice left open to the individual: to live very fast, and die very young.
DBC Pierre discusses Lights Out in Wonderland from FaberBooks on Vimeo.
Looking at these books in the broader landscape of contemporary fiction, they look very singular. Realism and naturalism so dominate the narrative landscape today; to me this seems increasingly perverse and out-of-step with the strangeness of the times. As our lives have become so mediated, rootless, and lived out in fantastical, remote, internalised techno landscapes, contemporary fiction seems increasingly wedded to a faithful presentation of the real, what happened to whom and why – two other notable exceptions here are Alan Warner and Richard Milward. There has been a migration to the real and the solid – and this is as true of the building blocks of narrative (sentences, prose) as it is of plot, structure, theme, the nuanced subtleties of what lies behind story. Does this represent some kind of retreat from the hysteria of consumer culture? Is this a reaction against the excesses of the magical prose which threatened to dominate late twentieth century fiction in the wake of Rushdie, Calvino, Marquez and others? And what has happened to the great tradition of the decadent novel? Fiction less interested in reflecting back a ‘true’ version of society and contemporary morals and manners; fiction which instead engages with the hyper-reality of our lives, the grotesque ways in which a character’s progress can embody the spirit of the times, however bizarre things may seem.
There are very few writers working within this tradition today. Both J . K. Huysmans (in A Rebours) and Oscar Wilde (The Picture of Dorian Gray) created fantastical narratives with bloated decadence as their theme. Des Essientes and Gray were characters for, and of, the times in which they were conceived and both novels follow an interest in transgression that, through marvellously glided prose and imaginative fancy, faithfully represented the fin-de-siecle spirit without recourse to bread and butter reality. Both books were misunderstood, even condemned on publication – Wilde for being ‘mawkish and nauseous’, ‘unclean’, ‘effeminate’, and ‘contaminating’; Huysmans for his rejection of French naturalism under the grand tutelage of Zola (and for the barbaric act of having his character set precious jewels in the shell of a tortoise. But these are fearless, ambitious, uninhibited works of literature that have come – through prose and conception that owes nothing to naturalism – to represent the spirit of the age. In this (our) ‘age’ of excess, waste and sensation, where are the writers prepared to take on the grand narratives, stories conjured from the vanities that surround us, infused with manic energy and transforming imaginative wit and daring?
DBC Pierre is one such writer who should be celebrated for taking on this challenge. Lights Out in Wonderland both revels in and condemns the debauched personality of these End Times. Like Des Essientes, Gabriel Brockwell is an aesthete dressed-up in hedonist garb and his fantastically improbable journey to salvation, and philosophising along the way, seems to me classically in-tune with the great decadent tradition in literature. Indeed, these lines towards the end of the novel seem to make this explicit:
We will all be destroyed whether we like it or not. I say let’s like it. May this small book of certainties from a short life be your compass in a decadence, your mentor in times of ruin, your friend when none is near; and may its poking from your pocket be a beacon to all who share our spirit in end times.
To understand the true horror and sickness of a world engorged on greed, high living and the capitalist dream, we need fiction that is prepared to shock, entertain and unsettle. DBC Pierre’s new novel launches itself into this territory with the intuitive intelligence and wild energy of an artist prepared to paint his version of the world in colours and shades that owe nothing to realism or naturalism. Sometimes the world appears brighter when seen through the decadent lens.
