Vernon God Little, DBC Pierre ( paperback 2003)
£9.99
Won the Booker Prize in 2003!
The riotous adventures of fifteen-year-old Vernon Gregory Little' begins the blurb. You would be mistaken for believing the pages contain a merry, light-hearted tale of an adolescent boy's stereotypical adventures. In fact, DBC Pierre's debut proves a much subtler, darkly comic affair.
Although the reader does indeed get to witness the protagonist's passing into manhood, Pierre's style is far from the typical `romance of youth' story. Most striking throughout the book is the superb use of language, which happily grasps at the fact that modern day teenagers are not as eloquently spoken as yester generations may wish. Most pages contain a good dose of foul language, executed maturely for the most part.
The vernacular of central Texas, not just foul, is excellently represented. You are immediately thrown into trying to make sense of the strong southern accent Pierre so faithfully writes in; "I'll remind you that, stuss-tistically...", "Don't tell me you weren't close to the Meskin boy.". At first this a little hard to get to grips with, sounding the word out in your mind being the quickest way of grasping certain words or phrases. However by the end of first chapter Pierre has provided the reader with a firm vocabulary base and the faithful language truly adds to the depth and general roundedness of the inhabitants of Martirio, Texas.
We are introduced to the `barbecue sauce capital of central Texas' town by Vernon himself. A fifteen going on sixteen year old boy. The first person narrative stays true to the mind of an adolescent boy throughout the book, with persistent, imaginative off shoots from Vernon's hormone filled brain. Such tangents include all the typical things a young boy is concerned with; drugs, money, Taylor Figueroa's bikini `panties' and the `knife' of humiliation his mother has placed firmly in his back. Not so typical are the haunting memories of his deceased `Meskin' friend Jesus Navarro.
One Tuesday, tragedy strikes Martirio. Jesus Navarro shoots dead sixteen of his classmates before turning the gun on himself. When developments are made into the investigation in the form of an alleged second firearm linked to Vernon, his world spirals. The whole country seems ignorant of his innocence, from his mother and her overweight `Desperate Housewives' wannabe friends, to the sinister reporter who sees the young boy as his ladder to the top, Eulalio Ledesma.
The subsequent plot at first develops fairly slowly. The majority of the book consists of Vernon describing the life and characters of his hometown. Not until the final third of the pages does the story develop into some form of real excitement in Vernon's bid for Mexico and the life of a fugitive on the run. Tackling difficult issues as death, adolescence and depression, managing to layer it with a good helping of comedy is refreshing and makes for a read well worth a few hours of anybody's time.
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