Breakfast of Champions - DBC Pierre Interview

“Arragh, Jaysus – look at ye there now! Shure isn’t it yerself?” DBC Pierre strides into the Clarence Hotel’s Octagon Bar and greets Hot Press in a loud and worryingly strong rural accent. “Look at ye there now, sor! Yer lookin’ mighty grand, so ye are!”

It’s been a number of years since our last interview, but I never met a Pierre like this before. An acronym bestowed by some old, and largely deceased, Mexico City drug buddies, ‘DBC’ stands for ‘Dirty But Clean’. The longer I’ve known the man, the funnier this moniker gets.
Now aged 53, the Australian-born novelist – passport name: Peter Finlay – looks as battle-worn, dishevelled and sartorially unconcerned as ever. But having been based in Leitrim since shortly before winning the 2003 Booker Prize for his debut, Vernon God Little, he sounds as though he’s finally gone fully native.
Of course, the exaggerated accent is a joke. A wonderful mimic, he’s still slightly giddy after celebrating the birth of a neighbour’s grandchild last night. A large martini later, and he’s back talking in his curiously clipped hybrid of Australian, Mexican and London accents: although born in Oz, Pierre grew up in a prosperous enclave of Mexico City. When not travelling, he spends half his time living just outside London, the rest in his isolated Leitrim farmhouse.
“Yeah, I'm half there and I'm half in the UK as well,” he explains. “The house got a bit damaged in that big freeze a couple of winters back, and it's still fucked-up in certain respects. I started a rebuilding job, but it's taking a very long time. So I'm oscillating between states, like a quantum particle – a superposition.
“But the reason I'm still spiritually there, anyway, is that there's something that really resonates correctly with me. There's something honest. Leitrim, obviously, is beautiful; the naked howl of the wind and the deadly silence some mornings and the absolute black of the sky. It's like living in a fairy-tale. You could touch it – the texture of it is beautiful, physically, but there's something in the spirit of the place which is really correct.”
We’re meeting to discuss his latest book. Published as part of a new literary series celebrating the partnership between Arrow Books and the iconic Hammer Films, his supernatural novella Breakfast With The Borgias is chillingly discomforting.
When heavy fog causes an American academic’s flight to divert from Amsterdam to Stansted, the airline books him into a gothic guesthouse on the Essex coast. Discombobulated, jetlagged and unable to contact his girlfriend, he spends the evening drinking with an eccentric family who seem to be commemorating an anniversary of some kind. Needless to say, all is not as it seems.
“Hammer has been bought not just by a corporation but by genuine enthusiasts – and, to celebrate they invited authors to write what they wanted, provided it had a supernatural twist,” he explains. “It didn’t have to be horror. So it was just a letter that came along – and in the space I was in last year, with my current publishing and my current writing, it just sounded like a holiday.”
He wrote the book in his Leitrim hideaway, pecking away at his laptop keyboard with one finger at night (“I still haven’t learnt how to fucking type,” he confesses) and then editing during the daylight hours.
“In proper fulltime writing it probably took about three or four months, but it was dated for a year. I pegged down an idea and then first drafted it and then went in for the kill, and it was great fun. I relearned the feelings I have to have. If I’m having fun, presumably the readers will have fun as well. I’ve felt constricted a little bit these past few years because there’s been a constant schedule and the expectations have been really tight.”
Expectations, eh? He followed his Booker-winning debut (a comic satire about the aftermath of a high school shooting in Texas) with 2006’s Ludmila’s Broken English and 2010’s Lights Out In Wonderland. Although always praised for the sparkling originality of his electrifying prose, both received mixed reviews.
He says that writing a relatively light work such as Borgias has put him back on the right literary track (there’s another new novel well underway). “It kind of spat me back out onto the street of writing where I wanted to be. The last decade's been some degree of working on nervousness and fear because there’s a lot of money riding on the books succeeding, which they make you really aware of. So there’s been a lot of pressure to deliver.
“Anyways it was good. Random House created this new Hammer imprint. Jeanette Winterson already has written a really cool horror story called The Daylight Gate and Helen Dunmore has done one [The Greatcoat], so I think I’m the first male. But basically they’re just going to try and fill a bookshelf with as many different authors doing what they want on a theme of super-naturality.”
While it works as a horror story, Borgias also examines themes of quantum physics, parallel universes and our overreliance on communications technology – most especially mobile phones. “In the world of the instant, a text was the finger of God,” his main character observes at one point.
“I carry a mobile, but I was a relative latecomer to it,” he admits. “I resisted it... I carry one. But I don’t email on it, I don’t tweet, I don’t Facebook on it - which is to say nothing. But I do have a mobile phone, it’s fucking handy. Put it this way, you don’t have to be that old to remember scraping up the coins for a payphone on the street.
“Life used to be organised differently. If you were away for a weekend, people didn’t expect to hear from you – and that was that. And if they didn’t hear from you for a month, they maybe would call you. But the game has shifted.”
Given the supernatural themes explored in Borgias, does he believe in life after death?
“I dunno,” he shrugs. “The likelihood is that it's lights out. But we won't know. It wouldn't surprise me too much if there was some continuance of intelligence in some form. Not based on any belief in ghosts or anything, but it kind of wouldn't surprise me. We're not programmed for oblivion, for one thing. Most creatures are prepared for their death, in a way, but we're not. But who knows?”
As for his thoughts on parallel universes...
“Well, in a parallel universe, we’re both already drunk, man,” he laughs, raising his martini glass. “So shall we have another?”
We proceed to get Hammered...

Breakfast With The Borgias is published by Hammer