Vernon God Little by DBC Pierre

I have had to resort to requesting the remaining titles from the library as I have exhausted the local supply…and that’s despite moving to London – a move not motivated by the hunt for copies of Booker prize-winners, you may not be surprised to discover!  So as I write this review I am currently waiting impatiently to be informed that one of my requests is ready for collection…and trying not to be tempted into reading something other than a Booker!

I must say that the author’s name DBC Pierre has stood out from many of the others in my frequent scouring of bookshelves in secondhand bookshops and libraries – as slightly intriguing for some reason.  And his prize-winning book also stood out – for being the Man Booker to wind me up so completely (even more so than Oscar and Lucinda!) that the result was the literary equivalent of screaming at the TV.

I would like to state that I, sometimes inadvisedly, always finish books; I just can’t justify stopping midway through as I imagine that I would always wonder about what happened, whether it managed to redeem itself and, perhaps most crucially, I would be unable to form an opinion about it by having wimped out.  However, there was one particular book that I attempted to read as a teenager that I did not finish due to the fact that the protagonist was being setup so that no-one believed her side of the story and I got so infuriated by the unfairness of this situation I just could not finish it!  Today, however, since this novel was clearly deemed to be of merit by winning the 2003 prize, I gave it the respect it deserved and managed to force myself to finish it, despite the anger swirling within me akin to my feelings while reading that book all those years ago as a teenager. 

I suppose I should give credit to writing that can stir up such powerful emotions in a reader – that he must have described such repulsive characters expertly in order to generate such abhorrence.  He created circumstances that were so exasperating that I was itching to reach into the pages to knock some sense into the puny characters who populated a ludicrous ‘justice’ system and were, literally, sullying this young person’s life.  To give Pierre some credit, there was some exploration of underlying themes such as the nature of injustice, the wide-ranging forms of bullying in society and the role media can play in the exploitation of what people will do for the limelight and the insatiable greed for scandal, but unfortunately I found them somewhat submerged by the ridiculous story. 

I just really hope that in the remaining Bookers I discover some more appealing books that the last few that I’ve read…

The Siege of Krishnapur by J.G. Farrell

So it did win.  Hilary Mantel’s ‘Bring Up The Bodies’ was announced as the 2012 winner of The Man Booker Prize, and so with slight reluctance it gets added to the list of books I have still to read.  I am pleased that she is the first woman to win the prize twice and obviously I will withhold judgement until I actually read the novel, but as this is going to be a trilogy (!) couldn’t she just have won once as recognition of the series?!

Well, on to one of the other authors to have won the award twice (although in rather an unusual way as Farrell won his second prize as the ‘Lost Booker’; more on the that in a later post).  ‘The Siege of Krishnapur’ chronicles the siege of the fictional town from the British perspective during the 1857 Indian Rebellion.

The narrative circulates amongst the various British characters as they adjust from their settled lives before the Rebellion, to the chaos of defending their way of life and then their lives while besieged by ‘native sepoys’.  I’m not sure whether Farrell is trying to make a point about colonial rule in India by making this novel rather ridiculous, but its mocking tone definitely detracts from the story.  The characters felt like caricatures, superficial despite their thoughts and feelings of the events providing the narrative.  In addition, moments detailing Victorian aspirations and conventions, instead of providing depth and context, became tiresome in Farrell’s hands.  It appeared that the author had researched particular topics such as theories about the spread of cholera or phrenology, chose a character to recite his findings, and there resulted a rather artificial spewing of facts on the page.  Moreover, I feel that the book would have benefited from a map to show the layout of the besieged town and its improvised defences, as I found Farrell’s descriptions to be unsuccessful in their depiction of conveying either the infrastructure or the atmosphere of the siege.

Overall I found this to be a rather mediocre offering as a Booker Prize winner which was disappointing as the premise of ‘The Siege of Krishnapur’ should have translated into compelling subject matter, but I found Farrell’s writing to be inadequate.