Lights Out in Wonderland

'If any novelist can collate the killing irony of what is happening around us it is DBC Pierre ... Pierre shreds the pretentious sophistication and fake joyousness of our Michelin-starred palaces, driving them to the ultimate conclusions of hedonism with a ferocity worthy of de Sade ... As with the dextrous ventriloquism in Vernon God Little, Gabriel's living and very beautiful voice carries this convulsive novel ... This swollen, bruising novel needs to be defended as an artful shout of protest from a soul on fire, an ultimate call to sanity and to learn what has happened in our world, where "Profit won the game, but like an infection killed the host".' -- Alan Warner, Guardian >> 'He inspires delight and disgust, causing chaos to others while blithely partying. So begins an odyssey, as Gabriel himself terms it. The plot rests on getting Smuts out of a Japanese jail. There are, along the way, some set pieces of lunatic brilliance ...