Not the end of pierre show

Throughout its illustrious 27-year history, only three authors have ever won the much-coveted Booker prize with their debut novel.

Keri Hulme took it with The Bone People in 1985, Arundhati Roy’s The God Of Small Things won in 1997, and, just three years ago, the £50,000 cheque went (albeit very briefly) to the mysteriously monikered DBC Pierre for his hilarious and hugely original Vernon God Little – a trailer-trash tragicomedy about the aftermath of a Columbine-style massacre in a smalltown Texan high-school.
For whatever reasons, neither Hulme nor Roy have published a novel since. Which makes Monsieur Pierre the first Booker-winner ever to produce a follow-up that’s only their second book.
Being the sole member of such an exclusive literary club obviously brings its own pressures, though sitting on the bed in his room in Temple Bar’s Morgan Hotel, looking as scruffy and unkempt as ever, Pierre isn’t showing any visible signs of post-publication-stress-disorder. Actually, he seems to be in great form.
“What you have to remember is that this is like a game of football,” chuckles the 44-year-old author of Ludmila’s Broken English, undoubtedly one of the most eagerly anticipated novels of 2006. His new book has only just been published, and the football game to which he’s referring has already kicked off in earnest on the literary pages of the quality press. Unfortunately for Pierre, in this particular match, he seems to be the ball. The first big reviews are in and – yes, you’ve guessed it – he’s getting a bit of a kicking.
None of the critics are disputing the fact that Pierre is an extremely talented humorist and scribe (after all, as well as the Man Booker, he’s also mantelpieced the Whitbread First Novel Award and the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Award for Comic Writing).
However, they are complaining that his new book is trying much too hard, and is unfocused, undisciplined and more than a little show-offy. That it is dazzling rather than deep. They particularly don’t like the fact that he’s used words like ‘omphalopagus’ and ‘monozygotes’ on the very first page.
They’re also alleging that, despite his linguistic smoke and mirrors tricks, Ludmila’s storyline – hard to sum up, but essentially a dual-stranded affair involving recently separated conjoined English twins and a desperate, and desperately foul-mouthed, aspiring Russian bride – stretches credibility to well beyond belief.
Their biggest overall moan, though, seems to be that it’s nothing at all like Vernon. The themes are totally different, the narration has switched from first to third person, and even the locations have changed (from Texas and Mexico to London and the Caucasus).
Bah humbug! How dare he not repeat himself? (Of course, if he had, they would have called him a one-trick pony, but then there’s no pleasing some people – especially green-eyed literary critics).
“When I wrote Vernon, I thought I’d taught myself how to write a book, but in fact I realised that I’d only taught myself how to write Vernon,” he explains. “And it’s exactly the same with this one.”
In my opinion, his critics are being unduly harsh. Yes, the plot’s a bit out there. But, for all of its surreal zaniness, Ludmila is still a hugely entertaining read. There’s a giggle a page, a chuckle a chapter, and at least nine or ten health-threatening belly-laughs scattered throughout the book’s 318 pages.
Not that Pierre is particularly bothered about the critics one way or the other. He’d already half-anticipated a hostile reaction to this book. You don’t come out of nowhere and win the Man Booker prize with your first novel, and then expect an easy ride with your second. Anyway, after the utterly insane life he’s led to date, a few critical potshots and backlashes are hardly going to hurt him. Or are they?
“Nah, not really!” he laughs, between pulls of a hand-rolled cigarette. “There’s been a little bit of vitriol and invective so far, but no worries, you know. I’ve had all of that kicked out of me already. Obviously enough, you have to be fairly sensitive to get into this game, and that does open you up. But I can’t take it too seriously either. And that’s half the reason why I kept the ‘DBC Pierre’ nickname on the book as well. I mean, I wrote it on the manuscript when I was writing it because it was just natural. And when it was going to be published, my agent said to me, ‘Pseudonyms are a bit out – why not use your real name this time?’ And I said, ‘Well, it’s not really a pseudonym, people have known me as Pierre for a lot of years’.
“And one of the reasons I kept it was I hoped that it telegraphs that my pride isn’t connected to the work. As soon as you’ve got something that doesn’t have your family name on it, and that isn’t connected with the expectations of generations before you, then you’re a free man. And when you can be free of pride, then you can be truly, truly free.
“So the critical barbs don’t really bother me at all. Like I said, this is a game of football. It’s probably been helpful having the kind of past that I’ve had. Because nothing will ever match the hurts that I’ve had over the years, you know.”
He blows a stream of blue-grey smoke up towards the ceiling and, idly scratching his beard, briefly considers that last statement.
Realisation dawns...
“Ah fuck, I’ve just gone and fuckin’ moxied myself big-time there, haven’t I?” he laughs. “Oh, Jesus! I’m in for it now! Ha, ha!”

His real name is Peter Finlay. DBC Pierre stands for ‘Dirty But Clean Peter’, a nickname one of his pals gave him at the height of the financial troubles that almost landed him in an Australian jail in the late 1980’s. Before the financial hassles, there were other problems in Mexico and Europe (smuggling, gambling, women, debts, etc.), and a few substance abuse ones to boot (mainly cocaine and heroin). When he won the 2003 Booker, the newspaper headlines weren’t of the kind the prize usually generates. For a start, they were on the front pages. And they said things like ‘Reformed Cocaine Addict Is £50,000 Booker Winner’ (Daily Telegraph) and ‘Repentant Rogue Wins Over Booker Prize Judges’ (The Guardian).
So, not your typically tweedy writer then. Not at all.
For the uninitiated, Peter was born in Australia in 1961, but spent much of his early childhood moving between England and the USA (his father was a renowned genetic scientist). His teenage years were spent in Mexico City, where he enjoyed a hugely privileged lifestyle. Anybody who saw Alan Yentob’s C4 Imagine documentary on Pierre a couple of years ago – for which the author returned to Texas and Mexico with a camera crew in tow – couldn’t have failed to be impressed by the palatial splendour of his former family home. (“It had actually been renovated since I lived there,” he explains, “but we still lived in this great big modernist place”).
His father fell seriously ill with a brain tumour when Pierre was 16, and had to move to New York for long-term treatment. His mother accompanied her husband, leaving their teenage son in charge of their well-staffed Mexican home (his only sister, who was a few years older, had already returned to Australia).
Left to his own devices in one of the most decadent cities in the world, and with envelopes full of cash arriving monthly, Pierre and his friends quickly found themselves a copy of the Physicians Desk Reference and got down to some serious partying and pill-popping.
By the time his father eventually passed away, the 19-year-old was fully embarked on the road of excess and irresponsibility. A talented illustrator, he’d already had some cartoons published in magazines and designed album sleeves for musician friends, but university and art school were definitely out. He didn’t have the grades for a start. Nor did he have the inclination.
In his early 20s, he got busted smuggling a car across the US/Mexican border, and had his residency permit confiscated. This complicated things somewhat. Suddenly unable to work in Mexico, he moved first to Australia and then, following a near-fatal car crash, on to Europe. Around the same time, the Mexican government devalued the currency, wiping out the Finlay family fortune almost overnight.
Valiantly attempting to shield his mother from the true state of the family’s financial affairs, Pierre began to beg and borrow in order to keep her in the style to which she’d always been accustomed. He also began to use industrial quantities of coke and smack. At some point in or around his mid-twenties, he allegedly sold a friend’s house in Spain in order to stay financially afloat (something the tabloids made much of when he won the Booker).
A failed attempt at film production landed him in massive debt in Australia and, unable to pay, he wound up having to appear in court on an almost weekly basis towards the end of the 1980s. Narrowly managing to avoid jail, but court-ordered to go through a serious process of drug rehabilitation, he finally moved to London in the early ‘90s. It wasn’t a happy time.
He worked briefly for an advertising agency in the Caribbean in the mid-’90s, but that didn’t work out either, and he eventually returned to London, where he entered another long period of unemployment, disillusionment and artistic stagnation. His fast-approaching 40th birthday gave him a bit of a mental kick, though, and the sight of an American teenager being handcuffed outside a high school gave him the beginnings of an idea for a book.
Although he’d never attempted to write a novel before, he wrote the entire first draft of Vernon God Little in just five weeks, and then spent the next 18 months polishing it.
He barely expected to get it published, much less win the Booker and other prizes, not to mention selling 750,000 copies (and counting). Nor did he anticipate that the subsequent media attention would result in his shady past catching up with him, propelling him to international infamy. But that’s exactly what happened. It’s not for nothing that he thanks ‘Outrageous Fortune’ first in the acknowledgements for Ludmila’s Broken English.
That brief biography doesn’t even begin to cover half of his life-less-ordinary story. There’s definitely an amazing tale there. Is writing a memoir something he’d consider? “Yeah, but I think way later,” he says, in his clipped, untraceable accent. “It would be nice, just because of the incredible colour of the details. I mean, the story doesn’t change, and I’m not in the least exonerated. But the details were extraordinary, and when I say details I mean the interaction of coincidence and fortune and destiny. It’s fucking amazing. And I haven’t even told all the good details yet. Ha, ha!
“I’ve been watching this, and I’ve confirmed it over my lifetime so far. We are given two pots of energy – negative and positive – and a stick to stir each of them with. And you spend all your upbringing being told not to fucking stir it, not to use this bit. And there’s no question that when you throw the dice in life, when you go outside of the fuckin’ frame, and when you know you’re doing it, you also stir up fate and kismet. It’s an amazing, amazing thing.
“And when you gamble big, when you go outrageous, outrageous things happen out of the blue which are unconnected with what you’ve done. I’m not talking about cause and effect, I’m talking about secondary things. You stir your energy here in the middle, and somewhere way on the edge, unconnected, out of the blue... you do awaken a form, you know. And that’s an incredible thing.”
So, looking back on his life, does he feel he wasted his youth – or conversely, that without living it as he did, he wouldn’t be sitting here today?
“It’s a zero equation. It’s a shame things went the way they did, but I’m stuck with it. But it did lead to an artistic expression, which is what I was trying to do in the first place. I mean, half the reason I was in trouble was from thinking that I should or would do something artistic of some scale. So it’s just a question of, like anything, once you get that kicked out of you, then you’re actually free to make it happen.”
Having had such a privileged upbringing in Mexico, does he think he was an arrogant youth?
“People didn’t find me arrogant, but my playing of the dice in life would have been arrogant, yeah. I took bold, bold risks, definitely. And that certainly was kicked out of me. Yeah, I made humility a thing after that. But I did it in such detail [smiles] that, in a world that is pretty competitive, I couldn’t get anywhere. You know, I didn’t come across as if I thought I could do anything. So I went the other way – and overcompensated.”
Not that that was necessarily a bad thing, in retrospect.
“There’s an incredible freedom in complete anonymity, you know. There’s a great freedom in being thought slightly a fool, and being thought a bit of a loser as well, because, from the point of view of an observer, which I am, it’s the perfect position. People lose themselves around you. And that’s exactly what I need. I need to watch them hang themselves to understand things and to get material, so it’s perfect. But you do lose that a bit when you get well known.”
Is being famous a good or a bad thing for your writing?
“It’s a neutral energy,” he shrugs. “If this had all happened to me in my twenties, things would have been very, very different. Like really different. And I don’t know what that would have meant, because I wasn’t a blatant arsehole – people liked me. But I don’t know if I would have capitalised on that and become Salvador Dali and gone over the top attention-seeking or whatever. Also, I’ve got the energy of coming into this game pretty late and feeling a bit of pressure to make up some ground. And that just means writing good things, and taking risks with that. So in a certain way perhaps the boldness that I misplaced in my youth, I should use now. Because it’s not a bad quality in itself – to take risks and punts. So putting that into books and making sure they don’t get fucking boring is probably the best route. But fame for the act of writing is neither helpful nor unhelpful.”
Of course, he isn’t just famous. He’s infamous. Notorious even. Curiously, though, the most controversial writer of 2003 hasn’t been paying very much attention to the big literary scandals of 2006. When I ask him about the JT Leroy and James Frey controversies [see panel], he’s only vaguely aware of them.
“Someone told me a bit about them the other day,” he smiles. “From what I’ve heard, it sounds like they fucked it up by not double-whamming the ending. They had to come back to that ending with something even bigger – like necrophilia! Ha, ha! They should have pulled a Salvador Dali on that and said, ‘Actually, now you are the authors’ or ‘You are the fools!’ and done something outrageous that positioned them back over the crowd that was judging them. But they obviously didn’t talk to me beforehand! Ha, ha!”

The very first thing DBC did after success came knocking was pay off the numerous debts he had accumulated over the years (he says he has now paid back everyone, bar two people he couldn’t track down). He used whatever money was left over to buy a house on an isolated Leitrim mountainside, where he now lives with his long-term Australian girlfriend, Jennie. He enjoys the solitude of the place.
“After the whole Booker thing, everybody I ever knew got back in touch,” he says. “I reconnected with a past that I’d been cut adrift from for more than 10 years. So you can’t say it was ‘good’ necessarily. But it was interesting.”
His biggest and most publicised debt was to the American artist Robert Lenton, whose Spanish house he allegedly sold without permission in the 1980s (not quite what actually happened). Do they still stay in touch now that the debt’s cleared?
“Not for a while now,” he admits. “We sent each other Christmas cards. But I’m very, very cautious for his and his family’s sake. I’m very cautious about how I treat that. I want to patch things up, but don’t want to appear to be... sucking-up.”
He says it was a wonderful feeling finally paying off his debts – particularly because most people he’d tapped had never expected to get their money back.
“The feeling was overwhelming. The amount who came back and said, ‘Fuck it, it was no big deal’. Because a lot of these were genuine and friendly loans. And I’d ended up making a lot, lot more of them than these people had. So anyway, the end result was that everyone seemed very chuffed for me.
“I’m not wiping the slate clean for everything but at least it’s a fucking good start. It’s given me a sense of permission to move ahead. I reckon that stopped me more than anything for all those years – just the sense that I’d so badly fucked-up, and that my instincts – which in the end weren’t instincts, but psychological compulsions – had all been wrong.”

Although he travelled to the Caucasus to research Ludmila’s Broken English, he wrote every word of the novel in Leitrim (which may explain the bloody killing spree at the end). He says it was a totally different experience writing a book that he already knew was going to be published.
“It’s tricky – one of those conundrums in life. There’s an amazing freedom to not knowing – or, in fact, kind of expecting that you won’t be published. So doing something then, on command, does funnel you into a different headspace. Plus accounting for the shit that happened between the first one and this one, just physically, made it incredibly difficult. I came out of a dozen years of really not doing very much at all, and having a lot of headspace. And even needing it in the beginning, just working through shit and being unemployed and being unable to do stuff and being forced into yourself. Whereas this one had a really steep learning curve. It had to come out and there were demands. They’ll literally come to your door and knock if you ignore it. It was that strong. So it was a hell of a fucking juggle.”
It helped a bit that he’d already started the new book before his debut came out and the Booker brouhaha broke out. However, he didn’t begin the writing until the first advance cheque came through. In Vernon God Little, he did not trust...
“I was still suspicious,” he smiles. “I waited to actually see the money. So it wasn’t when they told me, and it wasn’t even when I signed a contract; it was when the money actually came through. Because I had it in the back of my head that ...” He lights another cigarette and pauses for a moment, before continuing. “Em, the summer before, I’d had my first-ever serious creative offer. And this was after Vernon had been sent out to some agents and hadn’t gotten anywhere. I’d gotten some rejections and didn’t hear from the rest of them.
“And it happened that, in the very early ‘90s, before I’d left Australia, there’d been some advertisements on the radio for a competition for a short radio play. And I thought that could be fun. Because I really like the radio. I think it’s kind of like books in that you have to engage your own imagination, which makes it enriching and makes it more memorable – you know, pictures kind of disconnect you, whereas radio and words engage you because you have to filter them into pictures. And I thought that was interesting and, on a weekend, I knocked off a mad crazy thing, a very short play about time and space, that had a lot of the satirical and political barbs that showed up in these other books actually. Mad, mad, mad romp it was. And it was the first thing I’d ever written, really.
“I sent that in and it didn’t get anywhere, and that’s it, end of story. Having finished Vernon and sent him out and all of this, I was twiddling my thumbs, and two or three months later, I thought, ‘Fuck, as a last ditch, I may as well resurrect that old radio play, clean it up, and send it out’. And because I’d written it in Australia, it had a theme that was a little bit relevant to them. So I sent it to the ABC (Australian Broadcasting Corporation), which is kind of like the Foreign Office. And lo and fucking behold, after two or three weeks, I got an email from a man... who, if I can remember him, I’ll fucking name him – bastard!”
A moment’s headscratching later he comes up with the offender’s name...
“Yeah, I got an email from a certain Richard Buckham. Now, bear in mind, this is 2001, and I was after four years of unemployment. Anyway, I sent it off and got a mail back from this Richard Buckham, who was commissioning for the radio drama department. And he said, ‘We’ve all read this and we think it’s fantastic, and what we’d like to propose is this and this and this’. Essentially I had to lop a little bit off the top, clean it up a bit, do this and that, and they were going to pay me x amount. I said ‘That’s fantastic!’ So we were all agreed and he said, ‘Right, that’s agreed so all we have to do now is put the contract in the post – you’ll have to sign a paper contract – and then, in about eight weeks, we’ll get underway’.
“And this was summertime in Europe. Fucking brilliant – a bite! I was elated. I thought, ‘Well, that’s a bit of money for the summer – a few beers, all of this and that’. I looked forward to each penny of it in great detail [laughs]. And of course I didn’t hear another thing from this cunt. And that, in a way, had been the story of many of the previous years. So I didn’t fully trust the Vernon thing at all. I mean, it seemed to be happening and everything, but I’d never met anyone in the publishing industry before, and you just have that paranoia that you’re not gonna believe anything until it’s actually in your pocket.”

In Pierre’s fiction, as much as in his life, there’s a lot more going on beneath the surface of things than is at first apparent – numerous symbols, subtleties and subplots. For example, there are exactly 555 instances of the word ‘fuck’ in Vernon God Little. You wouldn’t know it unless he told you, but these 555 ‘fucks’ actually represent the number of conquistadors who landed on Mexican shores on Good Friday, 1519. This kind of literary game-playing may seem pointless, but the man has his own good reasons.
“Well, the story of the conquistadors just adds a real twist to the book,” he explains. “It’s a desert island thing. Because I thought you had to have some added value in a book. Just the surface and the plot line isn’t enough. If you do get stuck on a desert island with one book, you can read different things in it.”
He’s at the same tricks again with Ludmila’s Broken English. There are lots of symbols, some obvious, others less so. There’s the western character who gets anally raped with an eastern rifle, and the fact that the formerly conjoined twins, whose antics and semantics occupy at least half the book, are named Blair and Gordon (former occupants of Albion House). Subtle, eh?
“Oh, you spotted that, did you?” he laughs. “Well, no apologies! You see, I’m not educated in literature. I’ve no idea what my contemporaries are doing, and I’ve no idea what’s been done before except for the books that I’ve read. And I had serious months of internal argument and distress over this. And they were on the theme of...”
He pauses, scratches his beard, and starts again. “You see, this started out with me thinking that I was doing a novelist’s duty, which is to make the symbols subtle and organic to the unflowering of the story. And to insulate – now this isn’t a duty or a tradition but it seems to happen – the work, so that it doesn’t seem influenced by even the overwhelming things in the world around the writer at the time that he writes.
“I was obsessed with this thing,” he continues. “And it wasn’t because I felt that I had to be any kind of different novelist or anything. It just felt a little bit wrong for the world to be so transparently mad and saturated with these images and for that not to get into the novel. I thought, ‘Well, I’m actually expending effort keeping that out of my novel and yet it’s supposedly a contemporary novel’. So I simply had to decide what way they would come in. And I thought the honest way was to make them the characters. Some of the dialogue of the character Blair is lifted from transcripts of speeches by the real thing. And some of the mannerisms and shit. But not enough to render it dated at all.
“But I had all sorts of headfucks about that stuff. Plausibility and the luridness of symbols were the biggies. But life around is so implausible and transparent now, and it’s so dominated by the information we get about these issues – and misrepresentations and misperceptions and lies and ignorances. And now they’re so fucken bold. You know how governments, speaking of the English-speaking governments, are now really running with the ball. They’ve got a few really fucking transparent lies past us, easily, and we’ve all gone ‘Oh right, evil dictator! Weapons of mass destruction! Sort it out then!”
We’re interrupted by the arrival of a tray-load of drinks from room service, the rapid consumption of which sends the conversation of onto all sorts of tangents (“Every Mexican fucken hates tequila – but I’m the only one honest enough to admit it!). Pierre starts telling me about some of the perks of his relatively new-found literary fame (besides the fact that Faber & Faber are picking up our drinks tab).
“One of the most beautiful things about all of this has been that it’s given me the opportunity to meet some really accomplished writers,” he says. “You hope that you can suck something through the air from them. But I’ve been lucky enough to have a beer with Roddy Doyle and a glass of wine with John Banville. It’s really great to meet these guys.”
He proudly tells me that the people of Aughnasheelin, his Leitrim parish, presented him with a crystal trophy, after he’d conversationally complained to the local priest Fr. Tom (who’s also thanked in the Ludmila acknowledgements) that, aside from the cheque, there’s no actual trophy for the Booker Prize.
“They presented it to me in the local parish hall, this big crystal trophy with ‘DBC PIERRE – MAN BOOKER WINNER 2003 – FROM THE PEOPLE OF AUGHNASHEELIN’ engraved on it. And they laid on a real feast – crisps, egg sandwiches, peanuts, fizzy drinks, the works. It really blew me away, to be honest. Growing up in Mexico City and then living in anonymous places like Adelaide and London, I never had that sense of community before. It’s a rare and beautiful thing.”
He’s actually heading back there tomorrow night, he tells me, before embarking on a four-month book tour that will take him to Australia, New Zealand, the South Pacific, France, Italy, America and the UK.
“I’m gonna be travelling forwards and back until June,” he says. “And then it’ll be back to some serious writing.”
His third novel is already fully plotted. He’s written about 100 pages of “winged ideas and rough notes,” but hasn’t fully engaged with it yet.
“It’s early days,” he admits. “I have the title, but I don’t want to tell you. Ha, ha! But I’m really excited about the next one.”
You told me before that this would be your sexually depraved book...
“Yeah, this is the decadent one,” he laughs. “It’s the only one of any of them that I absolutely know in detail and can feel and have known for a time. So this one is a real... [thumbs up]. And in fact, I almost felt like these other books were just about getting some craft under my belt and some experience before launching into this one. You see, I made an effort to be uncomfortable with this latest one. Because I kind of felt, after the Booker and all that, you can’t feel that you’ve made it or arrived after your first book. So I felt the best or the only way to do it was to go the other way and not to fuckin’ capitalise and do the same thing. It would have been easy to do another Vernon-y type thing.
“This book [Ludmila] is completely out of left-field. And it comes from some decisions as well. Namely that I have to very quickly become as good a writer as I can. And that’s my stated endeavour. Everything that we’ve spoken about here tonight – my past, my psychology, fame, fucking freedom from debt, any subject that we’ve mentioned at all is completely subservient to the primary thing of just making sure that I explore and write as best as I can.
“And not because I want to be anything new, but because I’ve tasted the possibility of making somebody I don’t know a long distance away fucking weep or laugh. Because if I can make myself weep or laugh at the keyboard, and know when I sleep a year later that somebody somewhere is doing that, then, for the first time in my life, I’ll have a home which is constant. And that’s me.”