DBC Pierre is one of our most uncompromising and original literary voices. His most recent novel, MEANWHILE IN DOPAMINE CITY, published by Faber, was shortlisted for the Goldsmiths Prize 2020. For CHEERIO, Pierre presents LITTLE SNAKE, a meditation on the ever constant allure of risk, fortune and fate which examines the nature of gambling and the mindset of an obsessive practitioner. To celebrate the paperback publication of MEANWHILE IN DOPAMINE CITY, CHEERIO’s Darren Biabowe Barnes spoke to Pierre about both books, dystopian cities and the similarities between risk and art.

DBB: Pierre, firstly huge, huge congratulations on the paperback publication of MEANWHILE IN DOPAMINE CITY! The novel is real treat, truly original in so many ways. What was the genesis for the book? Was there a specific moment or incident that made you want to write it?

DBCP: This book was a hijacking, I had started out with a mysterious character leaving an underground nightspot, and before that character had even developed, within the first chapter, the digital age had hijacked the whole book. In a way the perfect allegory, as the work went on to describe the utter hijacking of humanity for profit by utopianists who still believe Boolean logic can direct human life.

MEANWHILE IN DOPAMINE CITY satirises both what the digital revolution promised at its inception as well as what we as users have done with the technology since. The world the protagonist Lon lives in, full of surveillance and automation, is dystopian while also totally plausible. Did you set out to write a dystopian novel? And do you see the Londons, New Yorks, Tokyos of tomorrow as dopamine cities?

The Londons, New Yorks and Tokyos of today are already there: so it’s a topian novel, and actually very lenient. Remember not so long ago Facebook reportedly boasted to clients that it could identify and target teens who were feeling down; and not so long ago the Google street-map car was reported to be scraping all the data of the houses it passed; and not so long ago even children’s toys were being sold with listening devices for behavioural data-gathering. The dystopia is here and live: its most dystopian feature is that, like zombies, we don’t give a shit.

One of the most striking things about the book is the way it is presented on the page with two columns of text, mirroring the splintered, schizophrenic way the digital world often works.  Why did you decide to tell the story like that?

The old maxim ‘show, don’t tell.’ I had more or less finished the book before deciding it just wasn’t delivering a real sense of how the characters’ lives were unravelling. The glaring flaw of the digital and its relationship with human life is that it’s all still based on a binary system – but what happens is that we’re growing simplified in order to fit the digital world, rather than it attempting to match our sophistication. Also that section of the book was some fun, I just had to find a way to express the binary nature of life all of a sudden, where we’re focussed on two things at once (real life and virtual life), trying to tie them together. But I note, for anyone who thinks it sounds like hard work: you don’t have to read both columns, the story pays off regardless – it just makes us aware that something else in going on in the background.

You won the Booker Prize in 2003 for your debut VERNON GOD LITTLE, which captured hilariously the media cynicism and hysteria of Bush’s presidency. DOPAMINE CITY however lampoons where it is it seems we’re all heading. What is it that draws you to the seedy underbelly of modern life in your writing?

You know, damn, I’d still love to write a historical novel or a fantasy or something, but every day when I wake up I just find that the most lurid, whimsical and tragic environment of all history is the one we have around us. Nothing else is as fascinating to me as why we are this way. And looking back at old drawings and stuff from childhood, they were the same. So it’s a calling, I guess. Anyway historical novels have already been well done.

Your forthcoming meditation on the world of gambling, LITTLE SNAKE, continues that interest via a road-trip through Trinidad and Tobago. Francis Bacon's love of gambling is well known, though I'm not sure he ever made it to Port-au-Spain. Can you tell us a bit more about the book?

LITTLE SNAKE is an enquiry into outrageous fortune. Its starting point was a gamble I took after finding an actual little snake on my doorstep one day, but the book goes on to swivel and dissect what we think (and what science tells us) about probability and its relation to life. There are some gambling anecdotes but I’m more interested in the improbable coincidences of our lives, and the book goes on to propose that we don’t think correctly about the laws of probability. I’m interested in the creation of magic, and as soon as we put all the laws and rules aside which we believe govern our chances in everything, I believe we can find it in our hands.

I also recently read your introduction to Canongate's edition of NOTES FROM UNDERGROUND by Dostoevsky, himself also a huge, huge gambler. What do you think it is about risk and art that make them great bedfellows?

These are precisely the questions that LITTLE SNAKE sets out to examine. Lying behind both art and gambling is a desire, I believe, to wager or waylay our meeting with death: to touch it, ask its truth, seek its favour… Damaged people, and people in the throes of great paradoxes, all set up camp nearer death, and some who survive can do so through art or gambling. The dark jungle of mathematics where the odds of our existences and our deaths reside unseen from us is a magnet for some people. I believe a truth resides there, and some are drawn to play and learn what it is. The last century has given the power of gods to science, and that’s fine – but while science can tell us all the chemicals we need for life to ignite from nothing, it still can’t say how that happens. So there’s a sense that we’re truly on our own when it comes to the big questions of life: and excursions like gambling and art may be some kind of pilgrimage.

Lastly, the cover of DOPAMINE CITY is an absolute work of art. Did you help design it?

Isn’t it cool? It’s the first book for which I didn’t design a cover (not that any were previously used, I would design them for myself). This one, which is a fragment of stylised fennec fox, is the work of Jonathan Pelham for Faber & Faber, as briefed by publisher Alex Bowler. Big shout out to those maestros.