Raging Against The Machine

DBC Pierre is not the first novelist to claim that the writing of his latest book almost killed him. But today in the Clarence Hotel residents’ lounge at the end of a long day’s press duties for his third novel, Lights Out In Wonderland, the writer (real name Peter Finlay) is waxing literal.

“There’s an acknowledgment in the book to an ambulance crew in Norfolk where I was staying,” he says in a distinctive baritone that reflects years spent in Mexico, Australia, America – and Leitrim. “The deadline was never more than a month away, pretty much since I started the book, and at the tenth deadline I decided, ‘This isn’t gonna fucking happen.’ The only way it could happen is if I really went for broke, went to the wall with it.
“And I started working 22 hour shifts, I would work from 3pm ‘til midday the next day because I was at the tail of the thing, and I thought, ‘Okay, for a few days I’m just going to have to go for it, with a strategic three-hour sleep’. And of course it took a little bit longer, and after a fortnight or three weeks or something I fucking collapsed and had to be attended and resuscitated or whatever. And I was grateful enough that I told them I’d have to give them a mention in the book. The paramedic was very funny. He said, ‘You owe us a fucking chapter, never mind a mention!’”
Finlay, as even the most casual book browser will know, has led a most uncommon life (he regards Olaf Tyaransen’s 2004 Hot Press interview as the definitive account of his notorious life and times). He was rocketed to fame – and infamy – when his debut novel Vernon God Little won both the Whitbread First Novel and Man Booker prizes and went on to sell the guts of a million copies. Two years later the follow up, Ludmila’s Broken English, received a unanimous clobbering in the literary press. Even the most hyperbolic of commentators might be forgiven for regarding his third novel as a reputation-breaker.
Finlay has made no compromises. Lights Out is a full-bore book that purposefully disregards formal structure and operates as a sustained and furious protest against free market capitalism and 21st century consumer overload, all rendered in prose that suggests but never explicitly acknowledges Vonnegut, Orwell, Salinger and Swift. Like Vernon, its secret weapon is a Rottweiler first person narrative style that drags the reader by the hair through a succession of unlikely but compelling set pieces located in London rehab centres, Tokyo restaurants and abandoned Berlin airports.
“Maybe I was trying to answer some questions,” Finlay continues. “I was chasing a feeling, and that’s half of the problem. It seems impossible to think about structure and to put a framework around a feeling. And I knew what that feeling would be when I got there, but... anyway. It’s done.”
Was there a lightning strike that crystalised the new book’s synthesis of tone and theme?
“Do you know, curiously there was – and probably not the expected one. There was a moment in 2007 when I felt I came under a particular psychological pressure from a publisher to hand over what I was doing. That’s a result of Vernon having been profitable. Publishing is very adept at squeezing a book out of the tube, and I could feel those things coming around me when I was unready for it. A book’s a gestation, you don’t want anyone’s forceps up your cunt before the thing is done. And it hasn’t been a big deal, except it did result in maybe a more barbarous book.
“There were a pair of agendas going on, one suggesting that you take all the time in the world to develop, but with concurrent actions and things suggesting that in fact you’re already late, and anyone else could have done that weeks or months or years ago. I felt very bad over it, and it’s a similar feeling that I had in my family environment. People can hit your button without actually saying anything particularly abrasive.
“So I reacted really badly to those first manipulative attempts to just have me hand something over. I left what I was doing and started a much more angry and straightforward thing on the markets, basically because I was feeling they were going to rip my baby out of me at less weeks than it was ready, and serve it up dead, just ‘cos it looked like a baby. I mean it’s understandable, it’s a business and there’s money riding on it, but for some reason it set me off on a loop.
“At the time I couldn’t explain it and I still can’t completely, but it felt like breaking rock, day after day, it was a fear thing. Everything kept coming back to one thing: the nature of people putting probes into each other that could be activated just with a tone of voice or a glance or innocent words, which was also a theme in Vernon. And it all finally came together in understanding how the probes that were put into me were now activated by publishing, and how those same things are what the market is using to keep us on the hamster wheel. And suddenly it all made sense. It’s all the hind brain. There’s no reason behind any of the markets that deal with us on a street level. It’s all compulsion and impulse.”
In one of the best passages in the book, Finlay describes the relief his protagonist feels while buying a cup of coffee in Berlin.
“Drifting towards the light I realise I’ve been strangely relaxed in the capital of the world’s third-largest economy, notwithstanding my mission. Despite its being a larger and healthier economy than Britain, I find that my guard is down, the perpetual buzz of fear and frustration is gone. Perhaps because no business I’ve entered has been founded on a need to expand to fifty outlets by next year. No staff member has been primed to manipulate more sales from me than I intended to give. No cameras suggest I might flee without paying... No unit of my space or time has been seized under a philosophy that the tiny fraction of people who respond by weakness or mistake to a trick are a valuable target group. That work of bacteria in suits, involved in nothing but the business of themselves and of human decay, seems largely absent here. I’m not part of a sales curve. I’m not presumed a thief or a fool. And a coffee’s not a lifestyle choice. It’s a coffee.”
Funny how the procuring of a capuccino can feel like a psychic assault course.
“The finger up your ass,” Finlay says with a nod. “Every ten minutes of the day, if it’s not Vodafone it’s the bank. I’m not a far leftist, but there has to be something better for us to do than to buy ringtones and go shopping. We’re not even electing governments in certain countries now, we’re just putting management teams in. Obviously we have markets, and products have to trade around, but it’s consuming all of life, it feels like we’re being farmed. It’s really ironic that in Britain they bang on about how the government’s killed farming. No, farming’s very fucking healthy, but the animals have changed!”