Lights Out in Wonderland

Lights Out in Wonderland, by DBC Pierre, Faber RRP£12.99 317 pages

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Gabriel Brockwell, 26-year-old poet, anti-capitalist campaigner and narrator of DBC Pierre's third novel, superficially resembles Hamlet: a sensitive aesthete who feels that the time is out of joint. But where Hamlet dithered over whether to be or not to be, Gabriel has resolved before the end of the first paragraph of Lights Out in Wonderland that he is going to commit suicide.

He is in no hurry though, and decides that one last binge - "the greatest bacchanal since the fall of Rome" - is in order. Escaping the rehab facility to which his father has consigned him, he makes his way to Tokyo, where his old quaffing-and-snorting partner Nelson Smuts is working as a chef. Even readers familiar with Pierre's work may be astonished by the inventive debauchery of the ensuing scenes.

What follows recalls a remark once made by Lisa Simpson: "Poor Dad! He has the worst luck when he's drinking." A disastrous chain of events puts Nelson's life at the mercy of Didier Le Basque, a sinister international caterer who provides orgiastic banquets at which capitalism's fattest cats enjoy baked giant panda paw and caramelised white tiger cub, washed down with elixirs made from infants' tears.

Gabriel tries to appease Le Basque by promising to find an outre venue for his next beano. His search takes him to Berlin, a city that clearly fires the author's imagination ("Berlin, so routinely gashed by history, leaks antiques from certain basements like blood from dripping punctures in her flesh"), and the novel hits its stride as it builds towards that Pierre speciality, the deranged extended climax, with Gabriel attempting to commandeer the labyrinthine bunkers under Tempelhof airport for the banquet. Only if he succeeds can he save his friend's life, thereby enabling him to get on with ending his own.

It's an appropriate location, the airport that Hitler intended to be the gateway to the capital of the world, now a symbol of capitalist imperialism. If Pierre is equating capitalism with Nazism here, he's doing it unusually subtly. Most of the anti-market homilies that pepper the book are shrill, undergraduate stuff. Pierre is more interesting when more oblique, as when Gabriel reflects on the vaguely apocalyptic feelings engendered by living in late-capitalist times:

"A couple of weeks ago I started listening to Heart FM and it made me cry. Pop music. And I realised I'd spent my life saying goodbye to something without knowing what. We all have. It's not nostalgia, not retro fashion - it's the end of our flowering. Human progress is no longer a viable investment."

If Gabriel often sounds like Oliver James, his philosophy more frequently resembles that of Oliver Reed (as when he is "resolving for safety's sake to drink more from now on"). The novel is a celebration of the humanising, heartening powers of intoxicants. Anecdotes suggest that if you can remember DBC Pierre's partying days then you aren't him, but he recalls enough to lend his scenes of excess a ring of truth. Subjects such as the etiquette of coke-sniffing turn him lyrical: "Yes, high human qualities: sharing, keeping secrets, looking out for one another, are alive and well in the lavatory." The book has an exhilarating Rabelaisian quality.

The prose is correspondingly baroque, though under better control than in Pierre's last novel Ludmila's Broken English. Yet Gabriel's voice does not quite convince in the way that the eponymous hero's does in Pierre's now-classic debut Vernon God Little. He seems, for all his startling metaphors, to be only nominally a poet. He comes up with a list of decadent writers he would like to have at one of his binges but otherwise does not seem to have much interest in including literature in his stock of life-enhancing intoxicants.

Books can intoxicate; this one is seeking to. And although at times one feels like a user whose grade-A stuff has been bulked out with too much phenacetin, whether the author is in cautionary or consolatory mood, this is still truly potent.

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