Vernon God Little by DBC Pierre*

The most impressive thing about Vernon God Little, I found, was the narrative voice, which was first person- nothing special about that (although I am finding, more and more, that it's my favourite kind of narrative perspective and third person voice-of-god narrators are starting to bug me a little bit), but typically first-person narrators are somewhat obviously the voice of the author themselves. Not literally of course, but you usually get the sense that the narrator has more-or-less the same temperament and intelligence as the author. I'm always impressed when an author chooses their narrator to be, well, different in some way, and then consistently writes with those differences in mind throughout the length of the novel. A stark, recent example of this is The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time, but even in that case, the author had trouble keeping within the (admittedly very difficult) limits which he had prescribed himself**. VGL's limits aren't quite so restrictive, and consequently the voice does not stray outside of them so much, if at all. I appreciated this very much, and it was one of the principal joys of the novel, for me.

Vernon Little's best friend, Jesus, has just gone on a Columbine-style rampage through his high school, ending in his own suicide. While some of Vernon's thoughts and turns of phrase border on insane genius, his unique thought-process often results in actions that are galactically stupid, in no small part due to his catastrophic home-life. The media, in this book personified by sometime cable-repairman Eulalio Ledesma, needs someone to blame for the killings, and Vernon is that someone. This is the story of Vernon's reaction to being accused for participating in a mass murder.

From this brief synopsis, you'd be forgiven for thinking that this book delivers some level of analysis or insight into the society that produces and then crucifies the sort of teenagers who go on gun-rampages. You'd be wrong. The author establishes a great set-up, and seems to be leaning in that direction, but then doesn't seem to know quite what to do with what he has created. About halfway through the book, Vernon flees to Mexico, where events become so surreal I swear I kept expecting him to 'wake up' and find, Dallas-style, that he was dreaming it all (to the books credit, this doesn't happen).

About a quarter of the novel is in Mexico, but this is merely an aside, a distraction (added, I felt, because the author really wasn't sure where else to go) from the actual point of the book. Even when the book gets 'back on track' and back to America, it fails to shake off the surrealistic effulgence it took on down South, and descends into arch-parody (a Big Brother-esque death row where inmates are executed by popular vote- I'm still rcovering from repeated blows to the head from the allegory-mallet), and never really revives from it.

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