Breakfast with the Borgias

I am beginning to see this place as a kind of hell,” declares Ariel Panek halfway through DBC Pierre’s novella, Breakfast with the Borgias. It’s an oddly superstitious statement from a professor of computer science, but then Ariel’s flight from Boston to Amsterdam has been diverted to Stansted Airport due to heavy fog, and Ariel has found himself marooned at the Cliffs Hotel on the remote Suffolk coast.

Ariel, who plans to continue his illicit affair with undergraduate student Zeva once he gets to Amsterdam, believes his experience has become hellish because he can’t get an internet connection to let her know he has been delayed. By that point, however, the reader is aware that something far more sinister than an absence of wifi is stalking our hero.

The winner of the Booker Prize with his debut novel Vernon God Little in 2003, DBC Pierre has since published Ludmila’s Broken English (2006) and Lights Out in Wonderland (2010).

Published under the Hammer imprint, a literary wing of the famous Hammer horror film-making company, Breakfast with the Borgias begins like a conventional haunted house tale, as Ariel gradually begins to realise that the fog-swathed “Victorian pile” of the Cliffs Hotel is less substantial than it pretends to be. “It was as if the place were built of smoke,” Ariel observes, “as if fog had momentarily drifted into shape before wisping away to nothing.”

With its old- fashioned décor and its faintly heard soundtrack courtesy of a radio that appears to play only pop hits from the 1970s, the Cliffs Hotel is a mysterious, brooding character in its own right.

After checking in, Ariel meets the hotel’s only other occupants, the Borders family: the Borgias of the title. Leonard and Margot are a bickering, booze-sodden pair, aging parents to the headstrong 20-something Olivia, sullen teenager Jack and their adopted daughter Gretchen, a self-harming 17-year-old who “was translucently pale, skeletal under a T-shirt and sagging tights, with long tangled hair and sunken eyes”. Desperate to use their one operational mobile phone, Ariel settles into conversation with the Borders, and discovers that they have come to the Cliffs Hotel for an annual memorial. Unfortunately for Ariel, he neglects to ask what it is the Borders family are commemorating.

By the time it occurs to him to enquire, it’s too late: Gretchen makes an accusation of sexual assault against Ariel, and he finds himself trapped at the Cliffs, unable to make contact with the outside world.

In a playful novel that cheerfully blends theories of quantum physics into a story that is equal parts horror and mystery fiction, DBC Pierre has tremendous fun playing with names. Ariel himself is likely named after the spirit that haunts Shakespeare’s The Tempest, although Margot quickly bowdlerises his name from Ariel Panek to Harry Panic. Meanwhile, the Borders themselves are ironically named, given that they are constantly transgressing the limits of good taste as they slag off one another in their vicious eruptions of familial civil war, and that they ultimately reveal themselves as a permeable frontier between the real and the fantastic, the classical and theoretical worlds of physics, and life and death.

Despite the deftly sketched haunted house setting and Ariel’s entertainingly creepy companions, however, Breakfast with the Borgias is not a standard horror of scares and spooks and ghostly goings-on. Instead it is more of a haunting existential horror about what it means to be truly alive and human. Ariel’s predicament, confirmed by his repeated suggestions that he has found himself in hell (“The place was becoming a kind of hell,” he notes at another point), is one of being trapped in limbo, and calls to mind Sartre’s play No Exit, and the idea that hell is other people.

Here, hell appears to be the inability to fully connect with other people, despite — or perhaps because of — our advances in communication technology. The story opens with Zeva vainly waiting on a text from Ariel that will confirm his arrival for their clandestine rendezvous. Ariel, who is at this point crawling through fog in a taxi on the Suffolk coast, is staring at his mobile phone, which has just fallen dark.

“Ariel looked around at 20 kilograms of modern luggage — two laptops, a tablet, three kilos of cables and drives, and an Android device. Each contained nothing less than his life. All were precisely useless.”

The motif recurs regularly throughout the story, as Ariel desperately attempts to contact Zeva in Amsterdam, although it’s these very efforts, forcing him to engage with the Border family, that further ensnare him in the coils of the Cliffs Hotel. Later, in a kind of epiphany, Ariel realises that “by simply removing his phone and connectivity for a single day, and leaving himself at large with no other tools among strangers — he had managed to destroy himself”.

A ghost story, a crime mystery, an extended debate on the incompatibility of the classical and quantum worlds of physics, and a commentary on our obsession with, and dependence on, modern technology: DBC Pierre packs a hell of a lot into a 248-page novel. It also functions as a commentary of sorts on the business of crafting a story, as Pierre charts the emergence of Ariel Panek from the early fog of ideas and follows him through “the system” of the traditional narrative arc. “Ariel’s mind dealt best with systems, not chaos,” Pierre observes late on in the story. “As fascinated as he was with quantum mechanics, it was about unpredictability and chaos. It conformed to different rules, even made up its own as it went along. And although his stay at the Cliffs was more about chaos than structure, he refused to accept that a group of ordinary people with ordinary problems would not conform to ordinary rules.”

Happily for us, if not Ariel and the Border family, good fiction is all about extraordinary people with unusual problems not conforming to ordinary rules. By that measure, Breakfast with the Borgias is a beguiling piece of work.