Hell is a spooky sojourn without WiFi

IN this new novella in a literary horror series from Hammer, DBC Pierre turns his critical eye on our obsession with digital technology.

DBC Pierre has written an absurd and unsettling tale that questions our dependence on technology. Picture: Sarah Lee

AUSTRALIAN writer DBC Pierre is best known for his 2003 Booker Prize-winning debut novel Vernon God Little, a satirical critique of contemporary American culture. In this new novella in a literary horror series from British imprint Hammer, he turns his critical eye on our obsession with digital technology.

Breakfast with the Borgias opens with one of Pierre’s signature aphorisms: “Technology is the way, the truth and the life.” In tethering ourselves so intimately to this new miracle, this story suggests, we may have crafted a whole new hell for ourselves.

This alternately funny, romantic, absurd and unsettling variation on the “haunted hotel” tale explores competing versions of what it takes to make a hell on earth. Is it other people, as Jean-Paul Sartre insisted? Or should we look inward instead of outward, as John Milton’s Satan does when he famously declared “myself am hell”? (Both options begin to seem equally valid in Pierre’s universe.)

Hell for besotted university student Zeva Neely is anticipating a call from her lover, a state of being familiar to anyone who has suffered through the agony of waiting for the phone to ring. In the opening pages we meet Zeva alone at a train station in Brussels, waiting anxiously for Ariel Panek, her lover and computer science professor — “Wunderkind. Sophomore magnet. Barely thirty.”

They are supposed to catch a train together to Amsterdam, where they have planned a dirty weekend to coincide with Ariel’s presentation at a conference. Her emotional world depends totally on the phone in her hands: “If the device didn’t ring or flash a message before her train arrived she would shatter inside.” But the train pulls in, and he doesn’t show.

For Ariel, hell is a place with no internet connection. When his flight from Boston is redirected through Stansted, a regional British airport, bad weather forces him to stay at an isolated guesthouse on the Suffolk coast with no internet or phone signal. “I don’t have a good feeling about this,” Ariel says as he approaches.

His feeling is well-founded, naturally, and things get steadily spookier on the fog-covered coast. Unable to contact Zeva or use his accustomed technological lifelines to the outside, he is forced to fall back on the kindness of the ­eccentric family who are the only other guests, the Borders, disturbingly nicknamed “The Borgias” by the disgruntled manager.

Ariel knocks back a few Grand Marnier cocktails with Olivia Border and her parents, the extroverted but ailing Margot who mishears Ariel’s name as “Harry Panic”, and the deluded entrepreneur Leonard. Leonard’s phone gets a signal, he tells Ariel, but he is strangely reluctant to fetch it from his room, unwilling to disturb the mysterious Gretchen, aka “the little one”, their adopted daughter, who is using it. And in Gretchen’s deranged hands, the phone itself soon becomes an instrument of violence, physical and emotional.

Ariel is a specialist in artificial intelligence, a believer in the equivalence of computers and humans whose adherence to a rational world view is tested and ultimately wrecked in the course of his journey, which comes to resemble a modern day episode of The Twilight Zone. “There come times in any life when classical laws seem to fray,” the narrator explains. “Times when the impossible or unexpected forces one’s mind to abandon its learnings and look for new patterns from scratch.”

Ariel’s logical mind is uniquely unsuited to these circumstances. Without the crutch of the internet, his life falls apart: “ ... by simply removing his phone and connectivity for a single day, and leaving himself at large with no other tools among strangers,” he reflects at a low point, “he had managed to destroy himself.”

Margot despises technology and tells Ariel angrily, “All you’ve done is invent machines to keep us apart, to lessen empathy”. Connectivity, perversely, is the thing that mitigates against authentic human connection.

But it isn’t clear how much Pierre intends his reader to agree with Margot: the emotional connection between Ariel and Zeva is forged through technology and feels no less passionate for it. They meet in an online tutorial, and we watch their love affair take shape through text messages with their own special codes and intimacies, striving for connection across increasingly impossible distances.

Kirsten Tranter is the author of the novels The Legacy and A Common Loss.

Breakfast with the Borgias

By DBC Pierre

Hammer, 256pp, $24.99