DBC PIERRE Big Snake Little Snake: An inquiry into risk. Reviewed by Ann Skea
The Booker-winning author of Vernon God Little turns his attention to philosophy, mathematics, and the nature of cause and effect.
DBC Pierre was in Trinidad to make a short commercial film with a parrot. Living in a house on a hill, beside which ‘someone had thought to put a driveway like a ski ramp’, one day he safely negotiated this ‘bastard drive’ and had just unlocked his front door, when he noticed a little snake on his doormat.
I knew baby snakes carry venom, they’re born fully loaded and ready to strike. I took a step or two back but this one didn’t look perturbed. He lay like a special delivery.
Being a gambling man, DBC immediately started wondering ‘what background jungle of odds’ – what ‘cascade’ of events – had brought him and this little snake together on his doorstep. He decided that the odds were very long. Meeting this snake, however, turns out to be very significant for him, since the national lottery game ‘used mystical symbols alongside its thirty-six numbers’, one of which is a little snake. DBC bets on this Little Snake number and wins that night’s draw.
Luck? Maybe. In DBC’s philosophy of life there is more to it than that. There is ‘vivid maths’, the cascade of causes and effects that had brought him and Little Snake together, and another cascade that caused his number to win. There’s statistical probability, which calculates numbers based on sums, equations and algorithms: but what if there is another form of maths that describes patterns and events? And what if we could tap into it?
DBC likens the calculation of risk (gamblers’ odds) to a stage scenario:
… the background is an infinite jungle of risks where probabilities flick round like animals, none of which we can see, the jungle is dark to us, there are obscene hoots and cries but no creatures appear until they suddenly do. While here in the foreground are the mangroves of risks we are aware of and can possibly calculate.
One has gambling odds subject to human and animal influences; the other has ‘straight mathematical chances’. DBC’s goal in this book is to examine the first; the ‘panorama of imaginary maths’, ‘snake maths, a background and foreground of writhing coils’.
If this sounds complicated, it is, but DBC has a wonderful facility for using events from his own vivid life to shape his inquiry. He is an affable, sharp-witted storyteller with a nicely off-beat view of the world. He knows how to deliver a punchline, and he is often very funny.
I especially enjoyed his investigation into the betting practices of the punters frequenting the small suburban betting-shop where, being unable to afford a smoke, he began ‘recycling’ the ‘treasure of discarded cigarettes’ from the ashtray outside.
The betting-shop was gold for dog-ends as smoking was banned indoors and punters had to come out to soothe their nerves, grow their courage and reflect on the bang of their wins and losses. Winners smoke as much as losers at a betting shop, this is the observation.
Now I want to say here that I have never before and have never since scavenged for smokes, and even then wouldn’t have dreamt of it outside a casino for instance, being a person of lofty standards. But it gives a sense of that homely outskirts atmosphere that it felt like par for the course there.
He gets to know the regulars, listens to their ‘nervy conversations in two-word snatches’ (‘fuckin scratched’, ‘Jokin?’, ‘fuckin mongrel’) and learns the mythologies of the horse-racing track: ‘greys aren’t happy in strong sunshine’, etc. He observes that the bookies always make money, and eventually, ‘by instinct while observing the maths in the betting shop’, he works out his own betting system and ‘gifts’ it to us here.
DBC’s chapters are short and pithy. They also contain some serious discussions about relativity, quantum physics, parallel worlds, Schrödinger’s cat, Gisin’s intuitionist mathematics, and QBism (‘which proposes that a quantum state … is not an element of reality – instead it’s the degree of belief we have in the outcome of our measurement’). There is much to think about, so I read this book in short bursts. As Einstein apparently said, referring to the uncertainty of mathematical laws in relation to reality: ‘Mathematics is all well and good but nature keeps dragging us around by the nose.’
DBC always brings us back to the real world and its oddities, which include the parrot, and what he learns in Trinidad about La Diabolesse, Douens, and the soucouyant spirit that left him with a blood-soaked pillow and no visible signs of attack.
Little Snake guides this inquiry into risk, but there is also the ‘undreamt-of-risk’ posed by an encounter with Big Snake, which challenges his ingenuity and makes him think again about how our own attitudes might influence the odds. He doesn’t get to place a bet on the Big Snake number in the national lottery but, since the physicists’ uncertainly principle suggests that nothing is fixed and that ‘before we toss the dice we are both winners and losers’, he considers this to be ‘a quantum win’.
By the end of this book we are left to ponder whether luck is a question of colliding, and possibly predictable, cascades of linked events, and whether our own attitudes (confidence, or a firm belief that we are a winner, perhaps) can influence the outcome of these events.
Hello Little Snake.
Bonjour vivid maths.
DBC Pierre Big Snake Little Snake: An inquiry into risk Profile Books 2022 HB 176pp $29.99
Dr Ann Skea is a freelance reviewer, writer and an independent scholar of the work of Ted Hughes. She is author of Ted Hughes: The Poetic Quest (UNE 1994, and currently available for free download here). Her work is internationally published and her Ted Hughes webpages (ann.skea.com) are archived by the British Library.
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