Lights Out in Wonderland

For those who believe that the current global financial meltdown is in fact the latest harbinger of end times, rather than just a periodic downturn in economic fortunes, DBC Pierre's latest novel Lights Out in Wonderland offers some useful evidence.

At one end of the story is the troubled young narrator Gabriel Brockwell and his decision to end his life, and at the other end, the banquet to end all banquets - catering to the super-dooper rich and featuring a menu so improbable and debauched that even Heston Blumenthal might blanche: milk-fed tiger cub anyone? Everything, it seems, is coming to an end. But before the end, an odyssey of fine red wine, cocaine and toxic fish, which takes us from a secure psychiatric ward in England to Hitler's Tempelhof Airport via Tokyo. What unravels is not just a personal mission to find the nimbus of indulgence but a virtual polemic (with footnotes) on the extraordinary failures of individualism and rampant consumerism in the west.

DBC Pierre's debut novel Vernon God Little, the first person narrative of a fifteen year old accused of a high school massacre was an unexpected winner of the Man Booker Prize in 2003 but his follow-up Ludmilla's Broken English failed to impress the critics. Given his exotic and controversial background, it's probably fair to assume that Pierre's novels will always divide opinion, attracting devotion and opprobrium in almost equal measure.

But despite the surface sparkle of intoxicants and late nights, this is in fact a remarkably responsible and socially-aware novel. What you're left with is a rich and rigorous exploration of these times and a bitter invective on the emotional bankruptcy of individualism and the moral vacuum inhabited by unchecked elites.