jesus and silk panties (Vernon God Little - DBC Pierre)

Name: melee679

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Product:	Vernon God Little - DBC Pierre
Date:	27/03/04 (112 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: amusing

Disadvantages: hard in places

This debut novel by DBC Pierre is a strange book. A strange book that took me ages to read. The prose flows adequately for the most part, and the story is unique in it?s irreverent approach to a potentially taboo subject matter, which may account for it?s unlikely scooping of the 2003 Booker Prize.

The story is told by Vernon Little, prime suspect in the aftermath of a high school shooting in Martirio, Texan backwater and home of bar-b-q sauce. We meet Vernon in the wake of the bloodshed, his classmates and his best friend are dead, and he sits in his underpants in the police station, preoccupied with his footwear, thinking about Jesus, and very soon introducing us to the emotionally taut relationship he has with his mother, who ?has a knife in his back?.

Vernon?s teenage narrative is peppered with repetitive expletives and a critical observation of his fellow townsfolk, a hoard of gossiping, dieting, frankly hideous people, the worst of which is possibly his mother. He is a typical teenage boy, obsessed with girls, notably Taylor Figeuro, and with a particular penchant for panties. But does his occasional use of recreational drugs, and his fondness for lingerie catalogues make him a killer? Meanwhile his mother is obsessed only with material possessions, and her lack of them, and makes no effort to help her son, her concerns remain the concealment of ?family secrets? and maintaining an appearance of wealth.

At the BBQ smeared hands of Vaine Gurie, the local police officer with a badge at stake, Vernon finds himself at the centre of a media frenzy. His guilt is assumed by all without allowing him any voice, and amidst his brittle, hard man narrative, we see his vulnerability, Vernon is still a confused child. As Martirio revels in it?s fifteen minutes of blood soaked fame, Vernon is thrown into the path of Eulalio ?Lally? Ledesma, a conman hack who sees the opportunity to make his name at our protagonists expense. As the series of events g
ets more bizarre, and the window for declaring his innocence gets smaller, Lally sets to banging the final nails into Vernon?s coffin, having wormed his way into Mrs Little?s affections. With no support, and presumed guilty, Vernon hits upon a plan to make some fast money with the help of gawky Ella, and flees to Mexico, a place that to him speaks of beach houses and the salty smell of Taylor. And as he moves away from Martirio, I still wasn't sure what to believe, whether Vernon was lying to himself as well as me.

And I won?t give you any more plot that that, otherwise you won?t need to read the book. The first part of the story I found very hard to get into, there are a lot of characters thrown at you initially, but eventually I just let them wash over me and stopped trying to distinguish between a lot of them. Vernon?s language can be annoying, but equally can be darkly amusing, drawing comedy out of the blackest of events. About a half to two thirds of the way through it gets a lot easier to read. This coincides with the dropping of ?fucken? every other word, and the point where Vernon seems to have grown up somewhat, and the final third pulls you through at breakneck speed as you rush to find out what happens, and if the ending can be as unjustified as is darkly hinted at by the appearance of the media controlled death row.

The dialogue is funny in itself, a well studied drawl is indicated in the text, but more than that I found myself smirking at the story proper, the little twists and turns of the satire. Some of the characters nestling in these pages are priceless. Pierre has been ruthless in his portraits of the dangerously stupid, the criminal and the ignorant, not least his clear views on the miscarriages caused by ?trial by media?.
Stereotypes are held up and ridiculed, and Pierre makes no apology in using taboo subjects for his fiction. The high school shooting aside, he tells of child abuse, the kind of emotional abuse that V
ernon?s mother inflicts, plus the homosexual paeodophila of responsible members of the society. The whole book is deliciously cynical, streaked with a dirty, sleazy humour, making you feel awful everytime you laugh. Eventually, at the last possible minute, the whole blood stained story unfolds, laying the blame at the feet of the guilty parties. But what induced the massacre? Is our narrator a murderer? You?ll have to read to find out? It's worth the time, but a niggling part of me debates whether it deserved the Booker, clever and funny it might be, but it was hard work in places not to give up on it, which is a very unusual way for me to feel about a book. I think any other year it would have been hard pushed to even make the short list, but even with that unkind nugget aired, Vernon God Little is a unique satire, and a well penned first novel.


'Vernon God Little: A 21st Century Comedy in the Presence of Death' by DBC Pierre
My copy was £10.99, but you can pick up a paperback version on amazon at the mo for £5.49

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