"Breakfast with the Borgias" by DBC Pierre

Computer Scientist Ariel Panek finds himself in heavy fog in a taxi making for a hotel on the Suffolk coast. He is desperate to send a message for his student waiting in Europe; he is due to go to a conference and hopes to arrange a dirty weekend with her but he has no mobile phone (cell phone) or wi fi connectivity.

The hotel is old fashioned. He still can't get connected and the kitchen is closed. So is the bar but in the residents' lounge he meets the Border family, a strange assortment of weirdos, drinking cocktails. Leonard the father is trying to arrange a business consortium and wants Ari to invest. Wheelchair bound Margot tries to connect with him by talking about quantum entanglement. Rob the son hides behind the curtain playing computer games. Ari definitely fancies Olivia the teenage daughter. Then anorexic Gretchen arrives with a mobile phone that actually works; she proceeds to dismantle it and use it to gouge a wound into her arm. Slowly, the situation becomes worse and worse and Ari finds himself trapped with these strange people, the games they are playing, and the lies they are telling.

A Hammer novel, this book is meant as a horror to be written in a single setting. As such it failed on both counts for me. There was also too much made of the difference between the quantum world and the classical world; as an ex-Physics teacher I think I understood most of this but I doubt the average reader would find this more than geek-padding. But what really makes this book stand out as a classic was the brilliant dialogue. Every character is driven by their own internal logic and every utterance they make conforms to this. But rarely does a whole conversation make sense. So you are trying to decipher what is happening to these people (and it keeps you guessing almost to the very end) and what the hell is going on. As such it is beautifully crafted and absolutely gripping.

DBC Pierre also wrote the brilliant if equally quirky Booker-prize-winning Vernon God Little. August 2015; 248 pages

Vernon God Little by DBC Pierre

Winner of the Man booker Prize 2003!

This book is set in the fictional(?) town of Martirio (which is the Italian, Spanish and Portuguese word for martyrdom), the Barbecue Sauce capital of central Texas and concerns Vernon, the survivor of a multiple school shooting perpetrated by his best friend, a gay Mexican called Jesus. Vernon has been arrested as accessory although he is soon released thanks to an honest Judge and an incompetent cop who both belong to the town's leading family. The misadventures of Vernon as he is hounded by a reporter more concerned with career than truth and tormented by his mother and her bizarre lady friends read like a strange mix of "A Confederacy of Dunces", "Catcher in the Rye", "Good Times, Bad Times" and "Decline and Fall". Viewed in one way it is a boy's cry for help in a dysfunctional world. Viewed in another way it is a very black comedy. His relationship with his mother is exactly like that of every adolescent boy: helpless infuriated, unbelieving yet loving and protective.

Symbolism

I guess Vernon is Jesus (not the Jesus who wears silk panties and shoots the school up) and Taylor is Judas. Lally is the devil. I'm OK with the court and the quite nice judge who tries to help Vernon but in the end washes his hands. Death Row is presumably Hell though Vernon is there for rather longer than three days. I have no idea what part the old con plays, nor Mr Nuckles.

Brilliant. Well worth the Booker.

Jan 2009. 274 pages