|
|
|
January 11, 2004
Review: Lives and souls at stake
BACK in July, I read Monica Ali’s Brick Lane and enjoyed it at least as much as other recent literary successes. Therefore I couldn’t believe that there might be a more deserving contender for this year’s Booker Prize. My concern increased after the judges declared that their decision had been less than unanimous. Distinguished Oxford professor, John Carey, even confessed his preference for a conventional narrative which had failed to make the short list. Oh joy when I found this odd sounding novel by an author with an even unlikelier name to be one of the most amusing and compelling reads in a long time. It was also one of the most disturbing.
Vernon Gregory Little, accused of murdering his class fellows in one of those senseless random shootouts that plague America, is a teenage inhabitant of Martirio, barbecue sauce capital of Texas. We infer from the beginning that he is not the culprit. Gradually, we are led to understand, though, why he would be prime suspect in a society like Martirio’s, gripped vice-like by obsessive consumption and conformity with those social norms that guarantee its perpetuation.
Obscenely and hilariously, Vernon talks us through the miasma of what passes for a regular existence in small town USA. For instance, Mamas there twist unseen knives into your soul, not your back, more concerned with controlling what you eat than with supporting your psychological or moral health. Vernon recurrently fantasizes about escaping from Martirio to Mexico; one horrific component of the fantasy is Ma visiting him once he’s properly settled and shedding “tears of pride at the excellent sanitation and at my decent, orderly life”.
DBC (Dirty but Clean) Pierre makes an obvious point through his chosen pen name. What passes for decency and order in Martirio, Texas, is obscenely distorted by the vicious strategies of the pervasive marketing and media which fuel the system. There’s lots of household appliance purchasing and game show watching to divert the attention of Ma and her chorus of big hair, big bitch girlfriends from her son’s nightmare predicament. For Ma’s friends, Vernon’s typically unsunny, unsocial anti-small town American behaviour make it self-evident that he is the killer. Only one of the troupe betrays any humanity; even then, it’s motherliness in junk food overkill mode.
The real horror of Ma, however, is that she falls for Lally Eudesma, an evil genius reporter. In pursuit of a scoop on her son, his first move is into her bed. Overcoming the threat of Vernon’s trial to unmask his bogus identity, Lally’s final triumph is a reality TV show on death row, with viewers voting for the order in which the cons deserve to make their exit. While Ma pines for Lally to the end — he’s ditched her and moved on expediently to her friend’s, where communication systems are better suited to his journalistic needs — her son snarls on at his hideous manipulations, making plain that this is a depraved will which simply cannot be thwarted. When Vernon’s clever lawyer brings evidence in court of Lally’s shady identity, not even the criminal justice system is up to undoing him.
The killer, whose crime Vernon is charged with, was his pal, Jesus, pushed to the limit by classmates who taunted him for being a sexual deviant one time too many. Depending on your point of view, the classmates got what they did/didn’t deserve. In Martirio, you pass muster only if TV, merchandise, vulgar romance and self-righteous “moral” indignation rule your life. The sterile conformity of even the young in this suffocating small town provides an insight into just how tightly controlled are the lives of notionally “free” citizens.
During his last days in prison, Vernon gains his most piercing insight into the distorted world he was born into from a condemned axe murderer. Lasalle’s insight seems almost divine. In their first encounter, he speaks crazily of love and mercy; the next time they meet, he is on his way to the death chamber. At this point, he makes his icy revelation, “so simple that even you can understand. Papa God growed us up till we could wear long pants; then he licensed his name to dollar bills, left some car keys on the table, and got the... outta town”. Hail, Vernon God Little. “You’re the God, take responsibility, exercise your power.” If you have any!
A 21st Comedy in the Presence of Death is the subtitle of this fearless book. If you can stomach the raw language, the humour sweeps you through a remarkably observed shop of horrors — from living rooms to jails to the fresh air haunts of Martirio’s bleak youth. It is the irony with which the author dexterously counterpoints the sober issue of lives and souls at stake that makes the comedy superb.
Vernon God Little: A 21st Comedy in the Presence of Death
By DBC Pierre
Faber and Faber
ISBN 0-571-21642-0
288pp. £10.99
|
|
|
|
