The Booker Prize Podcast, Episode 5: The strange case of Vernon God Little

What exactly is ‘a Booker book’? Some might say it brings to mind a specific kind of high-brow, serious fiction, while others argue for a broader definition inclusive of more mainstream titles. Over the years, the pendulum has swung between the two and 20 years ago, in 2003, DBC Pierre’s debut, Vernon God Little, was awarded the prize. In this episode, we take a closer look at the novel and examine why it was an unexpected winner.

• Their childhood reading inspirations
• A brief – and slightly spoiler-y – summary of Vernon God Little
• The reaction to its 2003 Booker Prize win
• The author behind the novel, DBC Pierre
• Whether Vernon God Little stands up to reading 20 years after its release
• Books to read after Vernon God Little

Jo Hamya:

I think if anything it’s sort of one of the only things that makes a novel brilliant in my eyes. It’s so spectacular that sort of turning point has been caught. It’s almost a monument in a way. You think this is the point at which perhaps things went wrong.

James Walton:

Hello everybody and welcome to the latest Booker Prize podcast with me, James Walton.

Jo Hamya:

And me, Jo Hamya.

James Walton:

And there’re still early days for the podcast. So Jo, do you want to say a few words about what we do here.

Jo Hamya:

Every week we’ll be delving into Booker Prize related subjects of all kinds with an emphasis on variety. Obviously we’ll be discussing past Booker novels, but also films and TV shows based on them, memorable or just plain weird past Booker ceremonies and controversies, themes from different decades, writers we think should have won and perhaps even writers we think shouldn’t have. Basically anything Booker related that we think is interesting sometimes with the help of special guests. We’ll also of course be keeping an eye on the years Booker long lists and shortlists as they come along and any other exclusive Booker content as we go. And at all stages we’d like you to be involved along the way.

James Walton:

And in today’s episode we’re going to be celebrating the 20th anniversary of when this happened.

Speaker 3:

The winner of the 2003 Man Booker Prize for fiction is DBC Pierre for Vernon God Little.

DBC Pierre:

As famously said, I think I picked the wrong week to give up sniffing glue. You know?

Jo Hamya:

That was DBC Pierre picking up the Booker Prize for his novel Vernon God Little. But before all that, this is a relatively new podcast and not only that, my co-host James and I are fairly new to each other. Each week we’re going to ask each other a question and hopefully as we go along they’ll become evermore zany and eccentric until we finally plumbed the depths of who we are as people.

James Walton:

Oh my God, let’s not do that. Okay. Okay. Fire away, Jo.

Jo Hamya:

All right, so my question to you is quite tame this week. I thought we’d start out with that.

James Walton:

Well, mine to you is going to be bland beyond belief, so we’ll see what you’ve got.

Jo Hamya:

Well, just as a way of getting to know you and so that our audiences can get to know you. James, I’d love to know what you consider to be other than hosting this podcast, your career high so far.

James Walton:

Oh, that’s quite an easy one. I wrote and presented 17 series of a literary quiz on Radio 4 called The Write Stuff, which I’m hoping will be-

Jo Hamya:

Oh, is that with Sebastian Faulks?

James Walton:

That’s right. And John Walsh. Yes. And I was hoping that would get, I’m hoping that’s howls of recognition all over the country at the mention of that show, which I really liked. It sort of combined my slightly weird if skillsets quite the word, but I do like writing quizzes and I do like having a microphone and an audience and sort of showing off and I do like books. So that it was really fun to do.

Jo Hamya:

That’s so funny because I think I have listened to a few episodes of that and I did not make the connection.

James Walton:

I see. Okay. Maybe suggest a few more. And my question to you, as warned a little on the bland side, you’re a distinguished novelist, academic and critic, but what were your favourite books as a kid?

Jo Hamya:

Actually do you know what, a lot of my reading sort of came out of… this is a bit of a classic example and Merce Emre has written about this in the New Yorker recently, I read Matilda very young. And there’s that fantastic reading list from Roald Dahl at the beginning when she’s just discovered libraries and she’s reading Kipling and Dickens and I really wanted to be Matilda so I thought I’m going to go get all these books and I’m going to read them. And of course they went completely over my head. But that kind of instilled this appetite for reading beyond the realms of maybe what I could do at the time. And so I kind of arrived to a lot of novels that I later picked up as an adult very early on, like Nabokov or Virginia Wolf. I think the book that I still kind of reread to this day that I read as a child is The Little Prince.

James Walton:

Oh right, yeah.

Jo Hamya:

And that used to be a tradition of mine as a child up until I was about 17, once a year on my birthday to reread the Little Prince.

James Walton:

Have you read it since then?

Jo Hamya:

No, it was interesting I think about this stuff because I’m kind of approaching that stage of life where you think about having children and your friends are thinking about having children. And I do wonder how many of the books that I read as a child I would read to them and The Little Prince and perhaps Philip Pullman is the only thing I could think of. And now when I think of children’s fiction, I used to be a children’s bookseller, I’m more inclined to go down the kind of Tove Jansson, the Moomins root. There’s nothing from my childhood. I mean there was some Enid Blyton but all of it sort of fades away in comparison to these big books that I was sort of aspiring to read. I wanted to be smart enough to understand them.

James Walton:

Yeah, no, I was a Enid Blyton kid. I tried it my own children and Far Away Tree they liked and they quite liked the ones with a guy called Fatty who may or may not be called Fatty for the rest of the publishing future. But they like those ones but not so much… they did like Roald Dahl a real lot.

Jo Hamya:

I had actually I had to re-buy… I don’t know where they’ve gone, but all my old copies of Roald Dahl

novels have sort of been lost to time. And then there was that huge controversy that they were going to be rewritten as effectively censored. And I went on this massive spree of buying my favourites and buying my partner’s favourites. And he liked the Twits and Fantastic Mr. Fox and I wanted the Witches and Matilda, of re-buying these books before they could be altered. But of course they won’t be anymore.

James Walton:

No, I think it’d be fair to say that Penguin have caved while pretending not to. But anyway, should we get onto today’s subject?

Jo Hamya:

Yeah.

James Walton:

Which is DBC Pierre’s Vernon God Little. 20th anniversary of one of the more unexpected Booker winners I think possibly ever. And I thought it might be useful if I just set the scene as to why we would’ve alighted on this of all the books that we could have had the anniversary of. And I think two things that have been sort of constant in Booker Prize history have been controversy, manufactured or otherwise and a sort of pendulum swing between high mindedness and something more populist. So there used to be a thing I think called the book a novel or rather serious-minded exploration of ideas, maybe not absolutely the easiest of reads, bit of chin stroking involved.

And then every now and then people have thought, well that’s a bit too high-minded, shouldn’t we have books that will fly off the shelves more, particularly publishers have thought that. And we join the Booker Prize in the early 21st Century where it seemed to be the pendulum swinging more towards populism having one of those moments. So in 2002, the winner was Life of Pi by Yann Martel, which became a major motion picture in a way that say Hotel du Lac by Anita Brookner did not. And then we come to the year that we’re focusing on today the following year, DBC Pierre’s, Vernon God Little, a comic novel, quite a romp. And I was around at the time you were depressing you five or something?

Jo Hamya:

I was five.

James Walton:

Oh God.

Jo Hamya:

Well maybe six by that point. My birthday’s in May.

James Walton:

Yeah, six-

Jo Hamya:

Yeah, that’s one year more, James.

James Walton:

Okay, fine. I wasn’t six and I do remember it being hip actually. Quite a cool hip book to have.

Jo Hamya:

Really?

James Walton:

Yeah. And I don’t think all Booker winners have been cool and hip, but this one certainly was. But this naturally led to controversy. There’s a critical James Wood, very serious minded critic. He’s about the only person… He’s really good and close reader of books, but he’s the only person when I ever reading his reviews think, come on mate, it’s only a book as he kind of digs away earnestly. Anyway, he reviewed this in the London review of books and he started off by saying what had happened is this was when it was the Man Booker Prize, it become the Man Booker Prize in 2002.

Jo Hamya:

Also a source of great controversy.

James Walton:

And also a source of great controversy. And particularly when James Wood suggested that the Man group had asked for what he called shiny new populism, hence the win for Martel and for Pierre. And then there was furious letters to the London Review of Books by the administrator of the Booker Prize and the chair of judges John Kerry saying that the Man had put absolutely no pressure on him. This was most inflammatory and possibly libellous. And James Wood slightly caved. He said, okay, shiny new populism was a coinage of mine, but you can’t help noticing that the books are shiny and quite populist winning at the moment.

So it might have been that. I’ve got a slightly more possibly pompous theory that there was something quite poppy going on in the whole cultural era at that time. And I did look into the most successful bands in the UK in terms of singles where Robbie Williams, Girls Aloud, Busted and The Cheeky Girls whose big hitter you may or may not remember was called Cheeky Song (Touch My Bum).

Jo Hamya:

Yes. A big part of my middle school disco.

James Walton:

Okay. And also I think quite interestingly as far as I can see, 2002 was the last year in which the best picture Oscar went to the film that had been the highest grossing of that year. So the most popular film and the best picture were the same, which was Lord of the Rings: Return of the King. So that would be my theory that this sort of poppiness is reflected a bit in the Booker Prize lineup because not only did Vernon God Little win, but other books on the shortlist included Rick Lane, another big seller and Notes on a Scandal by Zoe Heller. Two books that people loved. There was one book perhaps more old school Booker Prize entry called Schopenhauer’s Telescope set in an unnamed European town with an unnamed narrator. And that only got as far as the long list.

Jo Hamya:

Well, as you pointed out with some alacrity, I was 5 or 6 in 2003. But I really wonder how much that holds up. I had to reread Life of Pi last year. I interviewed Yann Martel, which you can find on the bookerprizes.com, our website. It’s a great chat.

James Walton:

Very smoothly done if I may say so.

Jo Hamya:

Thank you very much. I’m all about the promo. But yes, I re-read Life of Pi last year and I did have that abiding sense that it was a sort of popular choice, a pop novel, but actually I found it to be deeply philosophical and incredibly nuanced and I thought that that label of it being a pop novel perhaps undersold it. And I feel similarly about this book, which you will have read at the time, but I’m coming to it for the first time 20 years after its win. And I don’t know that I would call it a pop or a popular novel. I would certainly call it, as James Wood did very cartoonish and certainly a very visceral reading experience.

And maybe it’s because the meaning of a popular novel or a pop novel has changed in my day now. I’m slightly confused from the perspective of someone who doesn’t have a memory of that time or only a kind of hazy memory of that time, how that label could have arisen because Life of Pi to me is an extremely meticulous, well-written, philosophical novel. And this is almost literary to a fault, really.

James Walton:

Oh, that’s interesting and annoyingly possibly even true which rather blows my theory out. But again, the memory of the time, well the previous three winners had been disgraced by Jane [Kurtsy], which is fantastic, but quite punishing. The Blinder Assassin by Margaret Atwood which I haven’t read but is big and a novel within a novel. And then Peter Carey’s True History of the Kelly Gang, which I have read and is written and is a difficult read.

Jo Hamya:

So all quite established authors. So I wonder if pop is simply a way of saying we’re going to give the mantle over to someone younger or less established.

James Walton:

Yes, possibly that.

Jo Hamya:

Well, maybe now’s the time to introduce Vernon God Little to our audience.

James Walton:

Yeah, go for it, Jo. Not an easy one, but go for it.

Jo Hamya:

No, it’s not an easy one. This is actually an incredibly sprawling book. It’s narrated by our protagonist who is in fact Vernon Gregory Little. And it starts in the aftermath of a school shooting in I think the fictional town of Montirio, Texas and Vernon, although he isn’t a suspect, he has been taken into police custody by Vaine Gurie who explains to him her worldview. And it’s one that really comes to mess with Vernon in all sorts of ways across the book. She says that-

Speaker 6:

Life is fairly black and white, it’s full of binaries really. There is either the truth or lies, there are either civilians or psychopaths.

Jo Hamya:

And this doesn’t quite work for Vernon. He’s 15 when the book starts and he’s 16 when it ends. But he’s a kid and he’s really still only just figuring out the stuff of life. Vernon at the time of this school shooting, had been sent out to run an errand for his school teacher, Mr. Knuckles. And as such he hasn’t seen anything but the shooter was a friend of his. He’s name was Jesus Navarro. And in fact, Vernon is one of Navarro’s only two friends, which is why there’s such great public interest in him.

And as the plot goes on, what becomes apparent is that because Navarro’s last act was to turn the gun on himself, Vernon being one of his only friends is an appropriate, as he puts it, skate-goat. So Vernon, we meet him in police custody, he’s being questioned and then fatefully, a friend of his mother’s arrives, insists that Vernon must be famished, that he must need lunch even though he’s been offered chicken wings and she whisks him away.

This obviously sets Vaine Gurie’s mind racing. She thinks that Vernon must be guilty because he’s flown from police custody and when she catches up to him, she tells him as much. Now Vernon is rescued again, rather fatefully by a man who appears from a white van, always a bad sign. His name is Eulalio Lally Ledesma. He claims to be a TV man and he kind of talks Vernon out of trouble with Vaine Gurie.

But at the end of all of this, he looks at Vernon, he says, “You owe me a story.” And that more or less seals Vernon’s fate. He goes home to his mum who only really has an interest in him insofar as it progresses her social life. And a little bit of time goes by and it turns out that Lally is living out of this van and Vernon’s mom takes him in. Lally’s first great betrayal is to shack up with Vernon’s mom and his second great betrayal is to promise Vernon a story which will run on TV, which will sort of redeem his good name, but which in fact paints him as a murderer.

Vernon gets very angry understandably and sets about the project of trying to uncover Lally as a fraud, which he is, but it doesn’t quite work. And so he decides that he needs to abscond to Mexico and he needs to go on the run. And I think I’ll leave it there so that I don’t spoil the ending. Readers can pick up the book and find out on their own whether Vernon lives or dies.

James Walton:

I might spoil the ending, but we’ll come to that. But yes, okay, what did you make of it?

Jo Hamya:

I have very mixed feelings about this book. It’s an incredibly voice driven novel and the voice is very high key. It’s Vernon’s voice, which is rude and filthy and often very funny and also full of I guess life’s deeper questions. The ones that you can only really ask when you’re a teenager.

James Walton:

Do you want to give us an example of the voice?

Jo Hamya:

So this is an extract from the book and Vernon actually it bears saying is talking about a kind of psychological knife that his mother is placed in his back in which she likes to twist in various motherly ways. And he says, “I learned that the authorised world doesn’t recognise the knife. Your knife is invisible. That’s what makes it so convenient to use, see how things work. It’s what drives folk to the blackest crimes and to sickness. I know it. The thing of everyone turning the knife just by saying hello or something equally innocent sounding. Courts of law would their pants laughing if you tried to say somebody was turning the knife just with their calendar dog whimpers. But here’s why they’d laugh, not because you couldn’t see the knife, but because they knew nobody else would buy it. You could stand before 12 good people all with some kind of psycho knife stuck in them that loved ones could twist on a whim and they wouldn’t admit it. They’d forget how things really are and slip into TV movie mode where everything has to be obvious. I guarantee it.”

James Walton:

What do you make of the voice because that thing that happens in a lot of novels really, but he basically meant to be and is to all intents and purposes, a dumb school kid, didn’t learn to write properly till he was about seven. And yet he writes prose like this. To be honest, that’s sort of fine, that’s how novels work, but is it a bit weird?

Jo Hamya:

The idea that he’s literate up until the age of seven and then suddenly comes out writing like this, I think is one of those things that you have to suspend your disbelief a little bit. I’m not fussed about that either. I think where it falls down for me is that the book with this voice sort of oscillates between a very kind of high key absurdism, a slightly unbelievable absurdism in the best possible way. In a way, I kind of wish that this book was an episode of Black Mirror I think is the best way to describe it.

But then at other parts it sort of diverges into a much more measured and a much more, again, philosophical tone. And I think there’s no in-between and it means that the overall effect is quite muddled and potentially lacks depth because just as you’re getting into the stride of this very voice-driven narrative full of bombast and character-driven, plot-driven method, you’re brought up short by these meditations on life which are much quieter and much… they do kind of make you scratch your head in a good way. But nevertheless you are brought up short by them and then you go to get into them a little bit more and all of a sudden the novel starts barreling along all over again and it’s a bit stop and start. It’s a bit jerky and that’s the only bit that doesn’t quite work for me with this voice.

James Walton:

I was thinking actually, it’s almost summed up by the fact that it calls these, I suppose what we might call epiphanies or whatever, he calls them learnings, which is quite a crude word, isn’t it? And then I had a sudden learning and then he’ll come up with some quite philosophical…

Jo Hamya:

Yeah. So the way that I thought about it last night actually when I was preparing for this conversation is that I think this is a book that can’t quite decide between show and tell. You know that if you’ve ever taken a creative writing workshop, you get told this really annoying thing of show don’t tell. And I don’t agree with that. I think it’s perfectly fine to do either, but pick one. And I think this book is sort of stuck between showing you these sort of grotesqueries. There’s a psychiatrist who comes up who’s quite pivotal to the plot, who molests Vernon, there are these school shootings. It’s in a way an incredibly macabre book that stuck between showing you these things in as brutal a fashion as possible and then telling you why they matter and why it’s so horrible and you don’t need both. You either do one at full speed and let the reader make their mind up or you do the other and sort of let them sit with what’s been told to you.

James Walton:

Yeah, I must say rereading it… I read it at the time and it did feel like a big blast of not exactly fresh air, but just it did felt like a really good blasty read, fantastic, really barrels along. Great that it won the Booker. Funny, dark, macabre as you say. But, rereading it, it seemed to me it is quite a mess this book in almost every way. I’m sure there’s plenty of great thrillers I’ve read that if I reread would all slightly fall apart plot-wise. But I think a Booker winner, you should be able to reread without it falling apart, plot-wise.

Just a few examples. So you’ve got this guy Lally who starts off, he says he works for CNN, that turns out to be the initials of an electrical goods shop in some small town in Texas. He’s basically a chancellor of a small town in Texas, ends up as a major media mogul.

Jo Hamya:

Yes.

James Walton:

And how come? How does that happen? When does he make contact with Taylor to send her as the honey trap to Mexico? We don’t know that. What are his motives in wanting to bring Vernon down? And then that bit where he’s charged with the 34 murders. And then the big turning point in his trial is that they contact the guy he hung out with in Mexico, the lorry driver who took him through Mexico says, “No, I didn’t have a Vernon Gregory Little with me. I had a guy called Daniel Naylor,” which was the name he was using, but they could have sent a photograph.

Jo Hamya:

Yeah.

James Walton:

I felt a bit that way with the satire. Obviously it’s a thumping satire on the media and sometimes in a very good way. Towards the end, for example, I think this is good, he hears these headlines on the news, “The Body of the American will be flown home today. 40 refugees also died in the skirmish, said the news. After the break, the end of the road for serial killer Vernon Gregory Little. We’ll have the latest on that failed appeal and also the duck in the hamster that just won’t take no for an answer.”

You see that seems good because that’s like heightened. But then the bit where they’re on death row with people voting to see who’s going to be executed seems to me preposterous, really. I think there’s two kinds of satire or comedy. One is, isn’t it funny that or isn’t it mad that which is fine. And one is, wouldn’t be mad if. And I think that’s different because if you say, wouldn’t it be mad if people voted for who was going to die in death row? Well yes it would, but it’s not going to happen.

Jo Hamya:

Yes. Although that being said, it is a clever book. It really is. When I started reading it, there were points that I was slightly either unconvinced by or repelled by, sat and thought about them for a while and realised that there is purpose to them. So for example, there’s a sort of running gag in this book about the inhabitants of Martirio being quite fat though on diets. And obviously I think at the time this was taken as a sort of slander against Americans. Americans are fat and lazy.

But actually the more I thought about it, the idea of these people who are dissatisfied and want to be fed but are feeding themselves the wrong thing on these diets or at the barbecue chicken house, leads them to seek out slightly evermore grotesque and heightened forms of pleasure because they’re not sort of taking care of themselves in the right way. So that made sense. At some point I kind of thought why Texas? This book could have been set anywhere. Why is it here? I thought about it and really, where else are you going to set a novel that’s partly inspired by school shooting?

James Walton:

Well, also, maybe just on a purely logistical level makes it easier to get to Mexico, I suppose.

Jo Hamya:

Yeah, exactly.

James Walton:

No, I agree with you. I think there’s more sympathy for the women then you think. I think we both watched the coverage of the ceremony on BBC 4 at the time. And there was much chortling, I felt at those women.

Kirsty Wark:

Of the boy’s mother and this kind of commoner women who are straight out of Jerry Springer or something.

Speaker 8:

Chicken eating stretch pant wearing Texan women. I felt dirty for liking this book so much. It’s so entertaining.

James Walton:

And that made me think, well, is he sort of punching down in my right on way? But actually he’s not really. There’s this little bit here where his mother says to him, “Well Vernon, you just know everything, don’t you? And Betty, which is one of the friends, one of the many fat friends, was class president of the fourth grade and had all the bubbly parts in school plays. She never cursed or smoked or drank the rest of us. Bright as sunshine she used to be until she started getting beaten black and blue by her father, whipped until she bled. So while you’re all critical and know everything about everyone, just remember that the rest of us are only human. It’s cause and effect, Vernon, you just don’t realise, even Leona who’s a particularly sort of villainous example was relaxed and sweet before her first husband went the other way.”

Jo Hamya:

Yes.

James Walton:

So I think there is some sympathy with…

Jo Hamya:

I think you are totally right. And that’s sort of what I mean when I say that it is really, if you take it apart, a clever book and a book that has intent and that is thought through, just that when you put it all back together, it doesn’t quite work.

James Walton:

Cartoony is right though, isn’t it though? It is quite cartoony in plot and in characterization. Whether or not that’s a bad thing, I’m not sure. But then it’s sometimes isn’t, you’re right, that I think it is a mess, this book. An enjoyable blast of a mess but a mess and I’m not sure how much it stands up to scrutiny.

Jo Hamya:

I’m really curious because you said that you enjoyed it when you first read it in 2003.

James Walton:

Yeah.

Jo Hamya:

What about it then made it seem cool to you or the book to have… you said that you met DBC Pierre at one point and shared a cigarette with him.

James Walton:

Not just one point, the Booker Prize night itself, actually.

Jo Hamya:

There you go.

James Walton:

No, the thing about him was for people, for… let’s face it, literary journalists, they tend to the poncy side. So this guy was-

Jo Hamya:

Talking about yourself?

James Walton:

The others. But I think he did strike us as he was pretty cool.

Jo Hamya:

What about him was cool?

James Walton:

He’d had this rackety life. He was a bit Bohemian, taking a load of drugs, hung out in Mexico, knocked around the world, produced this book first off. And so not long before the announcement, actually me and him sort of got chatsy and we went for a cigarette. But when I say went for a cigarette, in those days, not outside, just to the side of one of the tables in the British Museum, weirdly enough.

Jo Hamya:

This is really interesting to me because I’m here sort of a generation or two on reading this for the first time and that doesn’t really come across. And in fact, what I sort of focused more on both when I was watching the ceremony and while reading this book is that there’s a sort of tension in the portrayal of masculinity in this book that sort of comes to haunt DBC Pierre as he’s picking up the prize.

So in the book, Vernon really wants to be like Jean-Claude Van Damme or like James Bond. And in fact there’s this wonderful passage where he says… he’s in court for the first time and there’s a break, court adjourned. And he says, “Men hardened by the friction of learning, steel men of savvy quietly applied, crusty old boys of rough-hewn glory probably smoke a lonely cigarette in their cells during lunch breaks from court. They probably don’t talk to their moms.”

And that’s what he goes on to do. He goes to have a phone call with his mother. And there’s this sort of expectation of what a good lifestyle for a man is. This hardened savvy man who might find himself in prison that just completely falls down at every point in the novel purposefully so, I think. But that’s almost pitifully echoed to me in the ceremony footage where DBC Pierre goes up on stage and he starts out with that gag that we just heard about sniffing glue. And then there’s a dick joke, but then he runs out of steam.

DBC Pierre:

If Vernon was here, he’d remember that movie that has all of these men dressed in sperm costumes. Do you remember that? And they’re all in this big-

Jo Hamya:

And he’s sort of left clutching this check going, oh well I’ll have a pint with friends. And he tries to thank everyone, but the silences in between his thank-you’s grow ever more piteous and awkward.

DBC Pierre:

I won’t waste your time. I know I’ve got 15 minutes of allotted fame, but this will be quicker than that just to thank-

Jo Hamya:

And then eventually he’s dragged off-stage by Kirsty Wark who wants to interview him and the first thing she does is sort of snatch the check from him and she says-

Kirsty Wark:

Here’s 50,000 pounds as tales of your exploits.

DBC Pierre:

Oh Jesus. This won’t even touch my bank.

Kirsty Wark:

Okay, this is going to your creditors?

DBC Pierre:

Yeah.

Kirsty Wark:

I see.

DBC Pierre:

Yeah, all of it.

Kirsty Wark:

Are they sitting outside waiting for you?

DBC Pierre:

If they’re not now, I’m sure they will be in a minute.

Kirsty Wark:

So did you really run-

James Walton:

She just more or less kidnap him, doesn’t she?

Jo Hamya:

Yeah, she really does.

James Walton:

She just sort of holds him off and she keeps walking and talking. I’ve done a tiny bit of telly, walking and talking quite hard, actually.

Jo Hamya:

Yeah. And she really is.

James Walton:

She’s very good at it, because she’s very good at telly.

Jo Hamya:

No, she’s like a bloodhound, really. She will not give him rest. There’s a point where he sort of tries to veer off to the left to leave her and she’s, no, no. She drags him, she sticks him in a chair and she says, we’re doing an interview now. Tell us more about your sort of scandalous past. Really not letting him enjoy the moments at all. And that to me is kind of more of what comes out in this novel. Not necessarily that it’s essentially a book about masculinity, but more than the idea of slander against Americans and the fact that they may be fat or lazy. It’s more this sort of, I suppose, critique of what ideal or as Vernon puts it, TV movie lifestyle is and the characters that populate it and how that completely might mess your life up, how it might blow up in your face.

James Walton:

No, I think that’s right. Actually, I’ve got a little passage here, which I chose because I thought it had more or less everything about the book. The TV movie stuff is obsessed with panties if you remember, but also the bit where the writing goes over the top as well. So this is it. “That’s the kind of life I want. The life we were promised, a fuzzy old show with some flashes of panty and a happy ending. One of those shows where the kid’s baseball coach takes him camping and teaches him self-respect. You’ve seen that show with electric piano notes, tinkling in the background. Soft as ovaries, eating oatmeal.” Yeah. And I think it’s brilliant up until ovaries eating oatmeal, I’m not quite sure what that means. So you know what I mean? It’s a real mix of stuff.

Jo Hamya:

Yeah.

James Walton:

So when I described it as a real old mess, I think I’ll stick to that whether or whether or not I’m beginning to think that that’s not necessarily a terrible thing. I’m not sure.

Jo Hamya:

But I think one of the places that this book is actually, where it does hold up is its portrayal of the media landscape and what it does to people’s morals and what it does to their expectation of life and what it’s like to watch the news. And I was really surprised to find, as I was reading that actually for a book written in 2003, this is a fantastic introduction to the landscape that is Twitter, where people who watch the news are sort of in a reaction economy to it and they’re bidden almost to respond in some way or to vote on what’s good and what’s bad on who they should hate, who they should deem a murderer in a way that blinkers them to fact and to actual truth.

And there’s this very sort of desperate plea that goes throughout the book from Vernon that he believes in the truth, he believes in the justice system and he believes in the idea that rationality and real life will win out and save his life. And it’s utterly ridiculous in context of this novel in the same way that it is to think about those same things on the internet.

James Walton:

No, what you were saying right at the start when that binary thing is set up and he can’t quite buy into it, and that binary thing that we’re extremely familiar with today. It also reminded me that there was a time when all the things that people now fear about the internet and social media and so on, creating the world rather than reporting on it, actually fabricating stuff in order to fill up space is exactly the same fears that we had about 24 hour news in the sort of nineties, I think, that it was distorting reality rather than simply reporting on it.

And this catches the cusp actually just between because this guy poses as if he’s working for CNN and CNN’s got to fill up all that space with all… 24 hours is a lot of time and every single day. So stories have to fill that time. But then it sort of morphs into the internet towards the end when they’re voting on death row as to who should live and die. In a way, one of the problems with a book that captures that quite so well is that now we think, oh yeah, we know that a bit. Do you think?

Jo Hamya:

No, I think if anything it, it’s one of the only things that makes a novel brilliant in my eyes. Because my partner read this book when it came out, but his memory of it was as being a novel of the eighties or the nineties. And I kind of turned to him and I was like, “What are you talking about?” This novel has references to Eminem and to email and it’s thoroughly an early 2000s novel. And to me it’s so spectacular that sort of turning point has been caught because you don’t think, yes, I already know this. You think it’s almost a monument in a way. You think this is the point at which perhaps things went wrong, that it’s captured on the page is sort of phenomenal to me.

James Walton:

That’s interesting. Yes, okay. I think I’ll buy that. Do you think we should move on to a question of what happened next?

Jo Hamya:

Yes.

James Walton:

I’ve been practising together Yann Martel and DBC Pierre a bit, but I think a hard quiz question would be, name any of other of those people’s books. Were they both one-hit wonders in a way, whether that matters or not.

Jo Hamya:

Yeah. I wonder though if you are not someone who is regularly listed for the prize by way of someone like Margaret Atwood or Salman Rushdie, whether winning the Booker once and not being long-listed or shortlisted again, confines you to being a one-hit wonder, whether that’s just sort of the Booker curse.

James Walton:

Possibly, a Booker curse might be a subject for a podcast at some stage, but I think just even the general reader who doesn’t necessarily know what’s Booker shortlisted and long-listed would be hard… a bookish person, someone who keeps up with the book. Well, the books might be hard pressed to name another Pierre book.

Jo Hamya:

I think that’s fair.

James Walton:

I actually did read a couple of his latest one. I made my one and only appearance on Saturday Review, which is Radio 4s look at the week in arts. And funnily enough, we had a book by him called Breakfast with the Borgias, and it was set in a mysterious sort of boarding house with weird guests. And it turned out in the end, I think spoiler alert, not required, they were all dead. And this was some sort of poetry. And I thought this was a rather brilliant twist and I was all set to say that. But whoever went first on this book’s discussion said, of course there’s this really obvious twist you can see from about page two.

Jo Hamya:

I hate those people.

James Walton:

And then everyone was going, yeah, really obvious what’s going to happen in the end. So I had to slightly change my tune. Yeah, oh yeah.

Jo Hamya:

Saw it a mile off.

James Walton:

Yeah, well, bloody hell, all dead.

Jo Hamya:

I’ve got a really shady understanding of who DBC Pierre is. I Googled him the other night and all I came up with were articles about him selling a house from under his friend, living in Mexico, having sort of alcohol and drug induced fugues throughout his early to mid-twenties. And I feel like I still don’t quite know who this person is.

James Walton:

Well, from memory, and I think even since, shadiness was part of the appeal in a way. It’s got that name, DBC stands for dirty but clean. Dirty but clean Pierre. Whereas in fact he’s a bloke called Peter Finley who was born in Australia, I think, to pretty middle class parents, British parents. His family then moved to Mexico where he grew up. And that possibly why he writes so vividly about Mexico in this book.

Then had a sort of rackety life, you’re right, drugs and alcohol, particularly cocaine, which didn’t come cheap back then, possibly. I’m not sure of current prices, to be honest.

Jo Hamya:

Not the good stuff.

James Walton:

No. And which meant getting into huge debts. And I think one of the things he did was he was house sitting for someone, I believe, and then sold a house from under them.

Jo Hamya:

As you do.

James Walton:

Indeed. And he was kind of ashamed of all this, and that’s why his Booker money went to his creditors. So he did have this sort of rackety life. Then in what he sometimes describes as the last throw of the dice and sometimes is what the hell, he decides to write a novel and this is the novel that it sort of comes out. He started off, I think from the perspective, he’s basically just seen some hopeless American kid after a school shooting, being put into a police car and thought it’s really… the book started off and maybe continues as showing how boys like that just have no chance. It’s not that kid’s fault, it’s the culture that he’s been brought up in.

Jo Hamya:

Yes.

James Walton:

But one thing he did change was that Vernon wasn’t guilty.

Jo Hamya:

Yes.

James Walton:

So there was a big change. I think he currently lives in Ireland. He gave an interview the Saturday after he won the Booker in The Guardian in which he swelt out that rackety life in some detail. And I think, as I said, the literary world was all a bit sort of agog at how… I’m afraid to say how cool all this is compared to our little lives of reading books and thinking about them and how… let’s face it, that’s not the life of A.S. Byatt, is it?

Jo Hamya:

No, not quite.

James Walton:

So I think that probably was part of the appeal. Would you now recommend it to people as, A, historical curiosity, B, a really good living novel or C, not at all. That’s not quite binary, that’s trinary.

Jo Hamya:

No, I can’t say I would put this in anyone’s hands. I have a list of books to recommend for people who perhaps were slightly disappointed by it in the way that I was. And again, that’s not to say that it’s a bad book, it is a good book. It’s, I don’t know, it’s a slightly mangled reading experience. And there are I think two major twists in it. One that comes midway through and one that comes towards the very end. And I did sort of stand-up and gasp at the one midway through, but after that point I did slightly find myself wishing that the book would come to a conclusion faster. And I don’t think that’s a sign of a novel that you want to recommend to other people. I would say that if someone had the patience, I would hand it to people who have in the past been fans of something like The Crying of Lot 49 by Thomas Pynchon or In Cold Blood by Truman Capote. But ultimately a reader who enjoyed those novels would be let down by Vernon God Little.

James Walton:

Yeah, I think all those books hang together much better than this does, really.

Jo Hamya:

Yeah.

James Walton:

It’s a first novel. He was probably as surprised as anyone that it won the Booker Prize.

Jo Hamya:

What about you, James? Who would you give this book to?

James Walton:

I think I probably would put it in of my category as historical curiosity. It’s not a terrible book, so you’re going to quite enjoy it and it’s not going to be a waste of your time. But almost what’s most interesting about it is that it won the Booker Prize 20 years ago.

Jo Hamya:

Yeah.

James Walton:

And so we come now to a bit of promised interaction with our listeners in a feature we call Booker Clinic, whereby we become rather implausibly, an agony aunt and agony uncle. You send us problems and we try and solve them through the medium of literature. Jo, have you got a question for us today?

Jo Hamya:

I do, and this one actually comes from the Booker office. So our anonymous listener says, “My two teenage kids, age 18 and 15 think for some reason that I’m deeply uncool. They don’t like my taste in music, films, clothes, et cetera. Perhaps if I recommended a cool book, they’d see me in a different light. Or maybe there’s a book to make me feel better about my relationship with my kids.”

James Walton:

I might know who that’s from and I find that rather hard to believe. But anyway, I’m not sure recommending cool books is going to necessarily work.

Jo Hamya:

I think recommending a book to your kids to turn around your opinion or their opinion of how cool you are, might just put the nail in the coffin. So my first recommendation actually isn’t literary, buy them tickets for Glasto or for [inaudible] or something like that, I think that’ll be more effective. But perhaps a book to make you feel better about your relationship with your kids, we can respond to that bit.

James Walton:

Yeah, I think we both came up with this actually, which is us by David Nicholls shortlisted a few years ago, and he’s got a son who regards him… he’s only got one, but he regards him with great disdain and he’s about to take them on a grand tour of Europe. Son’s called Albie and here are his rules that he sets himself. Doesn’t always live up to. “One, energy, never be too tired or not in the mood. Avoid conflict with Albie, accept light-hearted joshing and do not retaliate with malice or bitter recriminations. Good humour at all times.”

This one I think actually is a pretty useful one. Three, it is not necessary to be seen to be right about everything, even when that is the case. Four, be open-minded and willing to try new things. For example, unusual foods from unhygienic kitchens, experimental art, unusual points of view, et cetera.” This comes pretty hard to a middle-aged man, let me tell you. “Five, be fun, enjoy lighthearted banter. Try to relax is six. Don’t dwell on the future for now. Seven, be organised, but eight, maintain a sense of fun and spontaneity. Nine, at all times, be aware of Connie,” his wife, listen. “10, try not to fight with Albie.”

Jo Hamya:

Oh. It’s such a great book.

James Walton:

Such a great book. There was one I absolutely could swear was by Ann Tyler, which is that having a teenage child can sometimes be like… I think the first spaceship to orbit the moon didn’t land there, was Apollo 8. And so when it orbited the moon for the first time, it disappeared around the dark side of the moon. Although massive scientists were pretty sure that would be fine. Nobody actually been around the dark side of the moon before. Nobody knew for certain what was there. So there was a great tension while it disappeared and disappeared and disappeared and then it reemerged and they all cheered. And having a teenage child, I thought Ann Tyler said was a bit like that. Sometimes they will just disappear behind the moon and then they’ll reemerge and it’ll all be fine.

Jo Hamya:

That’s beautiful.

James Walton:

It is beautiful. But it turns out it wasn’t Ann Tyler at all because I said this to my kids, I said, “You know that this great novelist, Ann Tyler said this.” And they said, “Dad,” in the scornful teenage way, “you heard that on the Modern Family sitcom,” which in fact, I’ve checked up and it was from Modern Family, but it could have been from Ann Tyler, couldn’t it?

Jo Hamya:

Well done, Modern Family.

James Walton:

Yeah, I think so.

Jo Hamya:

I think the rather unfortunate thing is that most Booker novels, which concern a parent-child relationship tend to be full of abuse and trauma and alcoholism and drug addiction. As with Vernon God Little and his unfortunate relationship with his mother or indeed the Patrick Melrose novels by Edward St. Aubyn, Avni Doshi’s Burnt Sugar is a mother-daughter relationship that is just absolutely traumatic to read. And I’d offer you those, but I think the only consolation would be, at least my relationship with my kids isn’t this bad?

James Walton:

Yeah, there is that. Yeah, I think literature might overdo that. There’s a famous rewrite of Philip Larkin, which is they tuck you up, your mom and dad. And they kind of do. And if you’d like a similarly helpful advice with your problems, send any queries you might have to the Booker Clinic.

Jo Hamya:

Which you can do by sending an email to [email protected].

James Walton:

And that is only one of many ways to get involved. Please do like and subscribe to the Booker Prizes podcast wherever you listen to your podcast. If you want to get in touch, you can leave comments about this episode at the Booker Prizes substack, as well as the usual Booker Prizes social media accounts. That’s as you might imagine, Twitter, Instagram, and TikTok, where we also publish and promote a whole host of fascinating articles and videos at the Booker Prizes.

Jo Hamya:

We’d love to hear what you think, so please do get in touch. Bye.

James Walton:

Bye. The Booker Prize Podcast is hosted by Jo Hamya and me, James Walton. It’s produced and edited by Benjamin Sutton and the executive producer is John Davenport. It’s a Daddy’s SuperYacht Production for the Booker Prizes.