International Man of Mystery. DBC Pierre reads in Manchester.

Matthew Hull digs through the triumphs and failures of one of fiction’s most notorious writers – ahead of a long-awaited performance in Manchester

Manchester’s calendar of live literature events rolls on unabated, and with it arrives the chance to hear from one of the most exciting voices in fiction, DBC Pierre – who appears at the University for an exclusive reading on Monday. The author, real name Peter Finlay, is a true transnational: born in Australia, schooled in Durham and brought up in Mexico City, he is the stuff of a post-colonialist wet dream. Small wonder, then, that Booker judges clamoured to award the 2003 prize to Pierre’s debut novel, Vernon God Little.

Thankfully the book was a remarkable one; a Tex-Mex saga tracking the flight of the titular fifteen year old protagonist from custody after a wrongful arrest for mass murder, hounded all the way by a devious journalist intent on twisting him into a scapegoat. In all, it proves an exuberantly dark reading experience; a foul-mouthed satirical skewering of truth, justice and the American news media. The novel’s first-person adolescent narrator ensured comparisons to that most famous literary rebel without a clue, with The New York Times calling Vernon ‘Holden Caulfield on Ritalin’.

It was the subject matter of the book however, the high school massacre and Vernon’s trial by television, that ensured its critical and commercial success. Sandwiched between 2002’s Bowling for Columbine and 2003’s Jerry Springer: the Opera, the book rode a zeitgeist all the way to the bestseller list. The tales that emerged of Pierre’s wilderness years – his scamming, heroic drug intake and pursuit of buried treasure – certainly can’t have harmed sales either.

Pierre’s second book, the scattershot Ludmila’s Broken English, didn’t quite match the success of his first novel. In fact, it pretty much sank without trace and, in retrospect, it isn’t difficult to see why: there is little of the particular squalid magic of the author’s debut. The same year as its release, 2006, saw the screening of The Last Aztec, a hare-brained documentary-cum-travelogue in which Pierre returned to Mexico to trace the route taken by Hernán Cortés and his conquistadors to the Aztec capital Tenochtitlan.

But aside from Suddenly Dr Cox, a short story contributed for Oxfam’s Ox-Tales series, Pierre has been quiet of late, which makes anticipation of Monday’s reading high (all the more so given that the author was due read here over a year ago but was forced to reschedule). No one is quite sure what he has in store. The title of Pierre’s third book, Lights out in Wonderland, has been announced, but there is little other information to be had. A call to his publisher yielded nothing but a release date (2 September), while a peek at his agent’s website revealed, in place of a plot summary, a characteristically bizarre recipe for ‘Olive Ridley Turtle Necks in Parmesan & Brioche Crumbs’.

Ian McGuire, one of the chief curators of the Literature Live events of which this is part, is excited by the mystery surrounding Pierre’s appearance, commenting that he believes ‘it’s a marvelous opportunity to find out what he has up his sleeve’. Of course, the University has a something of a track record in eliciting the surprising from authors, with the 2010 Costa Novel Award winning Irish writer Colm Tóibín admitting last year in an interview for the Manchester Review that he just wrote for the money. Couple this with the courageously outré DBC Pierre and you have an event which promises to be as arresting and as beguiling as the author’s best work.

DBC Pierre reads at The University of Manchester on Monday 22 February (6.30pm) as part of the Literature Live series organised by the Centre for New Writing. £5/£3. Matthew Hull is a student of creative writing at The University of Manchester and the Co-editor of the Manchester based prose and poetry magazine, Bewilderbliss.

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