Skip to main content

Twisted Dreamers




We live in an inverted world.  What Yeats said in his apocalyptic poem ‘The Second Coming’ is truer today than ever: “The best lack all conviction, while the worst / Are full of passionate intensity.”

That’s why I picked up D B C Pierre’s 2003 Booker winning novel Vernon God Little for a second reading.  It’s the story of fifteen year-old Vernon Gregory Little who has been accused of murdering his friend Jesus.  Eventually he becomes a serial killer who has murdered sixteen of his schoolmates as well as many others in the town. One of his teachers, his psychiatric counsellor, his girlfriend and the media, all play cynical roles in making him a serial killer though he is innocent.

All of them have purely selfish motives in making Vernon the killer.  Taylor Figueroa, the girlfriend, sees her opportunity to become a media star by doing a sting operation on Vernon. She seduces him into admitting that he killed all those people for her sake, for her love. 

The novel has satirised almost everything from the ordinary people who convert tragedy into entertainment to the media that monetises the issue by live-telecasting the culprit’s life in the prison and organising reality shows as well as voting by viewers to choose the convict on the death row including Vernon to be executed first. 

The only person with some kind of morality in that inverted world is an axe murderer turned preacher.   He tells Vernon that the world is run by “intermingling needs” and those who learn to “serve that intermingling” get on successfully.  Vernon missed the boat, says the preacher, because he didn’t understand the ways of the world.  “Papa God growed us up till we could wear long pants;” the preacher counsels Vernon, “then he licensed his name to dollar bills, left some car keys on the table, and got the fuck outta town…. Don’t be looking up at no sky for help.  Look down here, at us twisted dreamers.”

That axe killer with all his foul language turns out to be far better a human being than all the moralists, teachers, counsellors, law keepers and the common folk who are all twisted dreamers in the novel.  Of course, the climax of the plot consoles us with the straight verdicts of conventional morality in which truth prevails in the end.  But truth’s victory extracts much pain from those who don’t care to learn the ways of the twisted dreamers. 

Comments

  1. Pranju chakrapaniJune 14, 2017 at 2:10 PM

    The axe killer seems to be an interesting character. Would love to give it a read.

    Of age, I am starting to realize the impact of re reading books rather than grabbing a new one all the time.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Tomichan MatheikalJune 14, 2017 at 5:48 PM

      It's worth reading. Quite similar to Salinger's 'Catcher in the Rye.' It's a coming-of-age novel which shows how growing up is essentially about losing innocence and learning corruption of the soul.

      Delete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Ghost of a Banyan Tree

  Image from here Fiction Jaichander Varma could not sleep. It was past midnight and the world outside Jaichander Varma’s room was fairly quiet because he lived sufficiently far away from the city. Though that entailed a tedious journey to his work and back, Mr Varma was happy with his residence because it afforded him the luxury of peaceful and pure air. The city is good, no doubt. Especially after Mr Modi became the Prime Minister, the city was the best place with so much vikas. ‘Where’s vikas?’ Someone asked Mr Varma once. Mr Varma was offended. ‘You’re a bloody antinational mussalman who should be living in Pakistan ya kabristan,’ Mr Varma told him bluntly. Mr Varma was a proud Indian which means he was a Hindu Brahmin. He believed that all others – that is, non-Brahmins – should go to their respective countries of belonging. All Muslims should go to Pakistan and Christians to Rome (or is it Italy? Whatever. Get out of Bharat Mata, that’s all.) The lower caste Hindus co...
121 comments
Read more

The Adventures of Toto as a comic strip

  'The Adventures of Toto' is an amusing story by Ruskin Bond. It is prescribed as a lesson in CBSE's English course for class 9. Maggie asked her students to do a project on some of the lessons and Femi George's work is what I would like to present here. Femi converted the story into a beautiful comic strip. Her work will speak for itself and let me present it below.  Femi George Student of Carmel Public School, Vazhakulam, Kerala Similar post: The Little Girl
44 comments
Read more

Romance in Utopia

Book Review Title: My Haven Author: Ruchi Chandra Verma Pages: 161 T his little novel is a surfeit of sugar and honey. All the characters that matter are young employees of an IT firm in Bengaluru. One of them, Pihu, 23 years and all too sweet and soft, falls in love with her senior colleague, Aditya. The love is sweetly reciprocated too. The colleagues are all happy, furthermore. No jealousy, no rivalry, nothing that disturbs the utopian equilibrium that the author has created in the novel. What would love be like in a utopia? First of all, there would be no fear or insecurity. No fear of betrayal, jealousy, heartbreak… Emotional security is an essential part of any utopia. There would be complete trust between partners, without the need for games or power struggles. Every relationship would be built on deep understanding, where partners complement each other perfectly. Miscommunication and misunderstanding would be rare or non-existent, as people would have heightened emo...
9 comments
Read more

Tanishq and the Patriots

Patriots are a queer lot. You don’t know what all things can make them pick up the gun. Only one thing is certain apparently: the gun for anything. When the neighbouring country behaves like a hoard of bandicoots digging into our national borders, we will naturally take up the gun. But nowadays we choose to redraw certain lines on the map and then proclaim that not an inch of land has been lost. On the other hand, when a jewellery company brings out an ad promoting harmony between the majority and the minority populations, our patriots take up the gun. And shoot down the ad. Those who promote communal harmony are traitors in India today. The sacred duty of the genuine Indian patriot is to hate certain communities, rape their women, plunder their land, deny them education and other fundamental rights and basic requirements. Tanishq withdrew the ad that sought to promote communal harmony. The patriot’s gun won. Aapka Bharat Mahan. In the novel Black Hole which I’m writing there is...
61 comments
Read more

A Lesson from Little Prince

I joined the #WriteAPageADay challenge of Blogchatter , as I mentioned earlier in another post. I haven’t succeeded in writing a page every day, though. But as long as you manage to write a minimum of 10,000 words in the month of Feb, Blogchatter is contented. I woke up this morning feeling rather vacant in the head, which happens sometimes. Whenever that happens to me but I do want to get on with what I should, I fall back on a book that has inspired me. One such book is Antoine de Saint-Exupery’s The Little Prince . I have wished time and again to meet Little Prince in person as the narrator of his story did. We might have interesting conversations like the ones that exist in the novel. If a sheep eats shrubs, will he also eat flowers? That is one of the questions raised by Little Prince [LP]. “A sheep eats whatever he meets,” the narrator answers. “Even flowers that have thorns?” LP is interested in the rose he has on his tiny planet. When he is told that the sheep will eat f...
8 comments
Read more