Title: Breakfast
With The Borgias
Author: DBC
Pierre
Publisher:
Hammer
Publish
date: 2014
ISBN: 987 0
09 958623 4
Book Quote:
‘He was
probably only in his fifties but a lifetime of disappointment seemed to hand
under his eyes and drip from the end of his words.’
_______________________________________________________________________________
Like an
idiot, I failed to observe who the publisher was on this little book, and like an
even bigger idiot I (as I inevitably do) failed to read the blurb.
Sometimes it’s good to be an idiot. It meant I approached
the piece with no preconceptions at all – which, having a quick scan around the
reviewing circles, shows instantly are what ruined the read for a great many.
It’s when
the ‘Waiting For Godot’ ambiance really started raising question marks (about a
fifth of the way through) that I flipped to the back and saw ‘Hammer’. Ah. Now
what.
Plot? A
quantum mathematics guru is stuck on the Sussex coast, en-route to a conference
in Amsterdam where he’s also rendezvousing with his besotted protégée and
lover. Ariel and Zeva, they’re called. It’s unambiguous to grasp we’re meant to
be spanning some distance here, the Alpha and the Omega.
From being
mildly amused (1/20th of the way through) to mildly bored (1/5th
of the way) to mildly irritated (1/4), I passed through bafflement, intrigue, and
via wonder and synaptic chaos to some kind of cohesion and at the end some
disappointment at landing back in reality – though ‘reality’ is hazy as the fog
that surrounds the Cliffs Hotel in this case. It’s certainly not a slap-dash
piece, as many reviewers seem to conclude. Impressionistic, maybe. But that’s
kind of the point, with the interjection of quantum theory woven into the text
and grammar in a dizzying Beckett-Woolf modern hybrid of associative syntax and
vocab.
The piece
looks at the nature of human existence through the angle of modern
telecommunications, AI and quantum theory. Again, many readers seem to object
that this is not frightfully original. Maybe not, but neither is it frightfully
hackneyed. In hindsight the concept itself (or the ‘twist’) is an old classic,
and many say they guessed it but I was clueless until more than half way
through… that’s the whole thing about not noticing it was a Hammer novella.
Anyway I like the way it’s done here. Four moose hoofs up out of five, with the
one taken off simply because there are few bits and pieces that simply don’t
gel quite perfectly. The brains, the vocab and sentence structures tying in
with the concept are quirkily great.
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