DBC Pierre is a man defined by his past. Any mention of him in the media today inevitably begins with his exotic back story as a con-man who embezzled hundreds of thousands of dollars to feed a cocaine addiction. Years of scrutiny have inured him to the rehashing, but even Pierre was slightly abashed when his last German publicity tour posters laid out his past rap sheet, in dot points and with Teutonic precision, accompanied by the tagline: 'Ask him anything you like!'
Pierre's shady biography emerged a week before the 2003 Booker Prize, for which Pierre's novel Vernon God Little - a dazzling satire about a 15-year-old Texan boy wrongly accused of a high-school shooting massacre - had been considered a rank outsider. His eventual victory elicited theories of a publicity stunt, and since then Pierre's writing has been overshadowed by his back story. But he is philosophical about this.
'The con-man past is a bubble, and because it's grubby it will always be a newsworthy introduction,' he says. 'But from a personal perspective, because it's a simplistic tag, it doesn't feel like me, so I don't take it too hard.'
In 2006 Pierre published the less-successful follow-up Ludmila's Broken English, a strange tale of romance, people trafficking and globalisation. His new novel, Lights Out in Wonderland, being released next month, completes the loose 'end times' trilogy about what Pierre considers to be a decadent modern culture. 'The trilogy is a snapshot of this first decade of a millennium. We've become very arrogant as creatures, and imagine we've reached a peak of civilisation - but actually I think this is the limbo before some major social change.'
Lights Out revolves around twenty-something classics dropout Gabriel Brockwell. Formerly an anti-globalisation activist, Gabriel has grown so world-weary he decides to commit suicide, but not before going on a saturnalian bender. The novel teems with vividly imagined scenes of Gabriel's decadent jaunts - from a sake-, blowfish- and cocaine-fuelled debauch with yakuza mafia in Tokyo to a hyper-exclusive banquet in Berlin's untouched Nazi catacombs where only critically endangered species make the menu.
The contradiction between Gabriel's extravagant excursions and the bleak time setting - the global financial crisis - provides fertile ground for Pierre to riff on familiar themes such as consumerism and the increasingly judicial role adopted by the media in the West, as well as an issue until now peripheral in his work: free-market capitalism.