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 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
47 comments
Read more

Joys of Onam and a reflection

Suppose that the whole universe were to be saved and made perfect and happy forever on just one condition: one single soul must suffer, alone, eternally. Would this be acceptable? Philosopher William James asked that in his 1891 book, The Moral Philosopher and the Moral Life . Please think about it once again and answer the question for yourself. You, as well as others, are going to live a life without a tinge of sorrow. Joyful existence. Life in Paradise. The only condition is that one person will take up all the sorrows of the universe on him-/herself and suffer – alone, eternally. What do you say? James’s answer is a firm no . “Not even a god would be justified in setting up such a scheme,” James asserted, knowing too well how the Bible justified a positive answer to his question. “It is expedient that one man should die for the people, so that the nation can be saved” [John 11:50]. Jesus was that one man in the Biblical vision of redemption. I was reading a Malayalam period...
19 comments
Read more

The Little Girl

The Little Girl is a short story by Katherine Mansfield given in the class 9 English course of NCERT. Maggie gave an assignment to her students based on the story and one of her students, Athena Baby Sabu, presented a brilliant job. She converted the story into a delightful comic strip. Mansfield tells the story of Kezia who is the eponymous little girl. Kezia is scared of her father who wields a lot of control on the entire family. She is punished severely for an unwitting mistake which makes her even more scared of her father. Her grandmother is fond of her and is her emotional succour. The grandmother is away from home one day with Kezia's mother who is hospitalised. Kezia gets her usual nightmare and is terrified. There is no one at home to console her except her father from whom she does not expect any consolation. But the father rises to the occasion and lets the little girl sleep beside him that night. She rests her head on her father's chest and can feel his heart...
19 comments
Read more

The Real Enemies of India

People in general are inclined to pass the blame on to others whatever the fault.  For example, we Indians love to blame the British for their alleged ‘divide-and-rule’ policy.  Did the British really divide India into Hindus and Muslims or did the Indians do it themselves?  Was there any unified entity called India in the first place before the British unified it? Having raised those questions, I’m going to commit a further sacrilege of quoting a British journalist-cum-historian.  In his magnum opus, India: a History , John Keay says that the “stock accusations of a wider Machiavellian intent to ‘divide and rule’ and to ‘stir up Hindu-Muslim animosity’” levelled against the British Raj made little sense when the freedom struggle was going on in India because there really was no unified India until the British unified it politically.  Communal divisions existed in India despite the political unification.  In fact, they existed even before the Briti...
16 comments
Read more

Loving God and Hating People

Illustration by Gemini AI There are too many people, including in my extended family. who love God so much that other people have no place in their hearts. God fills their hearts. They go to church or other similar places every day and meet their God. I guess they do. But they return home from the place of worship only to pour out the venom in their hearts on those around them. When I’m vexed by such ‘religious’ people I consult Dostoevsky’s novel The Brothers Karamazov in which there are some characters who are acutely vexed by spiritual questions. Let me leave Ivan Karamazov to himself, as he has been discussed too much already. In Book II, Chapter 4 [ A lady of Little Faith ], a troubled woman comes to Father Zosima, the wise monk, and confesses her spiritual struggle. “I long to love God,” she says. She knows that she cannot love God without loving her fellow human beings, or at least doing some service to them. The truth is, she says, “I cannot bear people. The closer they ...
11 comments
Read more