Book: Big Snake Little Snake: An Inquiry Into Risk
Author: DBC Pierre
Publisher: Profile
Price: ₹799
DBC Pierre — he won the Booker Prize for his novel, Vernon God Little (2003) — is out with his new book. Big Snake Little Snake is a treat for readers who enjoy charming, unhurried prose that is eager to tell a tale but more engrossed in the craft of telling than in extracting a round of applause from its audience.
Steve Panton’s cover design does a fine job of summing up the major themes with its key visual elements: a snake, dice, club, heart, spade and diamond. This book is about confronting danger when it shows up at the doorstep, hedging bets with the cards that life deals. It is a contemplative exploration of risk and randomness, intuition and order, reality and magic. Apart from these abstractions, it is also a book about gambling and gamblers.
Published by Cheerio, an independent publishing imprint and production company run in association with the estate of philosopher Francis Bacon, this book is billed as “a cascade of true stories… recorded while [Pierre was] on his way to make a short film with a parrot”. It is set in Trinidad, which is presented as a wild, tropical paradise bursting “with fruit and sex” where Pierre and his colleagues put out a casting call for “the right kind of bird”. They zero in on a parrot that belongs to “a quiet boy on the far coast” who claims that his bond with the parrot is “more sublime than any human bond”.
Aware of the criticism that might come his way for exoticising the landscape and its people, Pierre clarifies, “A parrot is a tropical trope and I believe in both tropics and tropes.” Ruminating about tropes makes sense in the context of Pierre’s broader thematic concerns. A trope is a structure of understanding built on assumption and confirmation. We rely on tropes because they help us deal with the risk and incomprehension that novelty brings. As Pierre notes, “… despite proclaiming our uniqueness we invariably add up to a curated shorthand of clues, as seen by others… even arguing our uniqueness is a trope.”
There are different kinds of snakes in this book — carnivorous reptiles and symbols in a lottery game. This unusual discovery gives Pierre an opportunity to venture into reflections on death, mythology, the growing disconnect between human beings and other species, and the folly of those who believe that everything can be understood through crunching data. However, he has tremendous respect for mathematics. Pierre writes, “No matter how dull and mathsless the places we come from appear, we already know vivid maths — because we listen to music and music is pure vivid maths.”
This is a dreamy book with a conversational tone. There are no characters to latch on to. Pierre’s playing field is his own mind. In projecting an image of unsullied innocence onto the landscape, he seems to betray a search for simplicity in his own life and environment.
He writes, “… there is a proven electrical frequency to humans. We radiate. Dogs can obviously pick it up. Ocelots, toucans and boas might get it. We can reportedly transmit to each other, but I’m not sure since we devised a system of language that we’re in the habit of receiving so much anymore.” This is not an off-topic rant. It goes with his observation that “most of our perceptions of risk, right or wrong, come from language and not from our senses.” This book is for people who like to think about the human condition.
