Petit Mal is a motley collection by Vernon God Little author DBC Pierre

PETIT Mal is a miscellany by the Australian-born, Mexico City-reared, Ireland-based author of Vernon God Little, DBC Pierre.

Aust novelist Peter Finlay aka DBC Pierre.

'HE shed over everything the lustre and amenity of his own dreaming," Virginia Woolf wrote of Thomas De Quincey, self-described opium-eater and grand eccentric of 19th-century English prose. That description, with its sense of outward watchfulness filtered through an imagination turned inward, of everyday reality transformed into a series of otherworldly arabesques, would be just as apt for De Quincey's modern equivalent, DBC Pierre.

Petit Mal is a miscellany by the Australian-born, Mexico City reared, Ireland-based author of Vernon God Little and two further novels of phantasmagoric comedy, violence, excess and a serene gentleness quite at odds with these fiercer components.

This motley of comics, cartoons, collages and short prose pieces has been modestly described by its author as a treading-water title - handsomely produced filler between longer works - yet its virtues are larger than that. After the bizarre maximalise of his End Times trilogy, hundreds of pages devoted to "the ongoing f..ked-upness of contemporary western culture", these sparse essays and quasi-fictions have the cleansing simplicity of sorbet after a 12-course blowout.

The manner and subject matter of the pieces is variable, everything from travelogues to postmodern fables and satirical diatribes. Together, though, they form something of an autobiographical core sample. There are accounts of studied and energetic auto-derangement, with titles such as Pharmageddon, that return us to Mexico City during the 1970s and 80s, destructive years that furnished the author with tales that start like wisecracks and end like nightmares:

You know it's a party when your dog has a breakdown. Years passed before I understood that summer. Across a span of months certain friends and strangers and I reversed civilisation, we spat the childhood out of my childhood home.

It is hard to know how close such stories cling to the actual contours of Pierre's life; probably the author himself is vague on the details. What is clear is that this early experience, of being a young man with means in a city where pretty much anything could be bought, left him unmoored for years.

Pierre's lost years in Australia and Britain are similarly touched on. In Temple the author describes his "end times", moving though "minefields patrolled by bailiffs and agents of the law" in terms that are melancholy and strangely affecting. It seems that the discovery of classical music helped true the author after years of wildly veering:

It didn't solve any problems; nights were still short, days were still blighted. But by the time I'd heard Sibelius, Bruckner and Brahms, it mattered less. They hinted at a shore behind the storm ... Notices were served to me on the roller coaster of Britten's piano Diversions for left hand alone. A set of Rachmaninov's Russian Songs sent me to the phone box to seek help. And as I stayed on the floor, close to these poems of oblivion, life grew inside me again.

"Big music," he concludes, "reformatted my feelings." What he did with that renewed sense of self is now, a decade after his notorious Man Booker Prize win for Vernon God Little, a small piece of literary history.

Petit Mal is largely silent on the existential uptick that resulted from that novel's publication. There is a self-mocking piece on the devoted and utterly hopeless Ukrainian translator of Pierre's debut; otherwise the default tone here belongs to a solitary figure, still brooding on collapse and loss, still prone to destructive acts, still tending to the defective mechanism of the self:

Look at failure. It's like a broken toy, one you can turn in your hands without ever killing the rattle of. It clonks when you pick it up, but doesn't go anywhere anymore ... It looks successful till you get close.

What saves the book from solipsism is anger, albeit couched in sardonic terms, aimed at media, commerce, politics, war: the four horsemen of our late-modern apocalypse. In the caustically titled Paradise Pierre relates a trip to Armenia, under the auspices of Medecins Sans Frontieres and with a Belgian psychologist, where he visits a village consisting of refugees from conflict, half of whom are intellectually disabled: literally driven mad by war. Visiting the local psychiatric hospital, overflowing with traumatised men and women abandoned years ago by their families, Pierre lets rip at a "world hooked on the turnover of conflict, on the savage, career-making glamour of unfolding crises":

So much pain makes no sense. But then war is only sexy when it's fresh. Television follows sex, money follows television.

It is pieces such as these, where Pierre's sense of personal damage meshes with the world's wider hurt, that the reader at last gets a look under the authorial bonnet. Here is the engine that drives novels such as Lights Out in Wonderland, housed in a vehicle that has been stripped of its boot-sized subwoofers, its garish racing stripes, its suicide doors.

Not everything in Petit Mal rises to this occasion. Some pieces are determinedly slight, elegantly rehashed bar jokes; others are little more than fragments. The manner of their arrangement, however, ensures that any looming ponderousness is undercut by comic interjection. What on first glance seems a rattlebag of a book turns out to be precisely engineered narrative assemblage, one that preserves and clarifies our sense of Pierre as a moralist disguised as a gadfly; a writer whose defiant excesses are a considered response to the world as he sees it; and a penitential loner, tucked away in a hotel room with a pocketful of De Quincey's "portable ecstasies", bent on making the familiar strange.

Petit Mal

By DBC Pierre

Faber, 151pp, $27.99 (HB)

Geordie Williamson is The Australian's chief literary critic.