'Vernon God Little' by D.B.C. Pierre

I’ve never worked so hard at staying with a book before. The first third of the book I found to be deathly dull and it was just so difficult to rally the motivation needed to keep reading. But then I remembered I never ever give up on a book. Once I pick it up nothing will convince me to put it aside. And, as luck would have it, I’m glad I stuck with it because once you power through that first third then it gets less painful and more interesting. Gradually but still, it gets a bit better. There will be spoilers, just letting you know now.

The main character, Vernon, is a survivor of a school shooting carried out by his only friend. However, he’s immediately treated as a scapegoat since the shooter then shot himself after killing his classmates. The only friend of this disturbed individual? Must’ve been disturbed himself! Where was he exactly during the shooting? Ambiguous answers, must be guilty! The way the events snowball epically out of proportion leaves you seriously doubting the justice system. It’s first believed he had some hand in the shooting, then that he killed a police officer, then that he went on the run and killed almost 20 more people during that time. It all becomes the most horrendous circus with no conceivable escape for him. He ends up captured in Mexico and trailed through a ridiculous trial (Only yes or no answers! Despite the fact a yes or no answer doesn’t actually answer the sodding question, stupid lawyer) and eventually chucked onto Death Row.

Now, how the trial actually managed to go ahead without finding him innocent at the end of it mystifies me. It says they had a whole host of experts, so where was the one examining bullet trajectory and bloody spatter and gunshot residue and all that jazz? Surely they could’ve sorted it out no problem and found Vernon innocent had they focused on evidence rather than rumour and conjecture? But I’m no expert myself so perhaps they did all that and it was artfully explained without making me aware of it. And when they were out searching the Keeter lot for the gun, surely they’d have found the den? Or the shitty paper that solved the whole thing? No? Right. We’ll just gloss right over that then. And what about the bullet wounds in the officer? Traced back to the gun registered to Vernon’s Dad, were they? No mention of that either. I’d call them plotholes but maybe I was just not paying attention. So we’ll just leave those alone, I guess. I’m not gonna deal with them if the author didn’t.

While yes, he gets mercilessly dragged through the mud and he is seconds away from death I do not agree with the assertion that he is a ‘hero’. At one point in the book in order to scrounge some money together he talks a troubled child into going to the house of a known paedophile so that he can do what he wants to her for money. He tells her before they get there that it’s just touching “nothing heavy” but then after he’s got his money he’s happy to leave her so the paedophile can do what he wants. I’ve never really had the urge to throw a book at a wall before but Christ if I wasn’t tempted there. He is not a hero, I don’t care that he’s wanted for murder, nothing excuses you from that choice right there. The whole thing gets glossed over pretty quickly and is never mentioned in the book again and I’ve not seen anyone mention it in their reviews (the few I read anyway). Child abuse is a recurrent theme in the book with both the Psychologist and the teacher involved in separate instances with the same children. None of it was really fleshed out spectacularly well for my liking though so I don’t have much to say about it. Other than that I’m still disgusted by the supposed hero’s actions and for the remainder of the book I didn’t care what happened to him on an emotional level, I was purely reading just as interest as to what happened next.

I didn’t connect with or like any of the characters in the whole book, come to think of it. Vernon’s mother and her friends all seemed like gross vultures and their behaviour never really made sense. They came across as the type of people who would latch onto a tragedy and milk it for all it was worth but they make little mention of the shooting. It could be explained that they were being sensitive to Vernon but I highly doubt it considering how quick they were to throw him under a bus the second a camera was trained on them. I get that I was supposed to care about the mother figure but I just couldn’t quite get there. In fact, probably the only characters I would’ve been interested in learning more about were Ella (the girl Vernon handed to the paedophile) and the shooter himself. He was bullied for being Mexican, bullied for being gay, abused by a Psychologist and his teacher? His story would’ve been far more engaging than that of Vernon or any of the cackling hags in the town.

Vernon is continually compared with Holden Caulfield of ‘The Catcher In The Rye’ in reviews, which could go some way in explaining my intense dislike of the character as I’m not a fan of Caulfield either. Boys who go around grumbling about the state of things and making observations about the way life is aren’t prophets. I don’t get the love for either of the characters. So, they make some good observations, so do quite a lot of people really. I know we all like to think we’re special snowflakes who understand the real world and not the system we’re expected to buy into but let’s be serious, we all understand the real world we just don’t know how to exist within it without the bullshit provided by the system. Can we just all get over ourselves, thank you.

Didn’t really like it all that much but it did get a lot better as the book wore on. So I’d say stick with it if you’re finding it as tedious as I was in the first section because it does pick up.

5/10