Vernon’s crowd are snappy, funny, loquacious, quick, brutal, thinkers, street philosophers, and so Vernon, although given top billing, accounts for only one individual in the equivalent of an ensemble film. We move in and out of the speech styles and worldviews of this kaleidoscopic crew, through third-person free indirect thought and embedded dialogue...Frank Wynne’s flexible, fine translation means this happens in a manner that is thrilling and exhilarating to read, whether it’s hipster slang, dispassionate staccato or slow, misanthropic bitterness. When interviewed, Wynne said that capturing Despentes’ dialogue was like 'trying to catch lightning in a jam ja'. Yet this is what he does ... You are disgusted? Then, Despentes seems to say, be so by society too. This is a world of contradictions, pain and ugliness. These people are cynical and disaffected. They satirise their own society. Never mind the revolution being televised – here’s the massacre, which will also be serialised ... Despentes can move from pulp fiction tropes and revenge motifs to episodes of horrific violence against women, to scenes of stripped-down delicacy and implication, such as a mother’s relationship with her adult son, or a woman’s relationship with her married employer ... The baggy narrative structure, where individual characters jostle against each other and have their say, moves towards a sudden, apparently shocking conclusion which, of course, the skilful Despentes has prepared us for all along. And then, beyond this, there is a mythologising coda, an imaginative projection which could be silly but is in fact deeply moving ... The first two books in the trilogy were reviewed with great appreciation and brio by the late Eileen Battersby in this paper. She imagined how Vernon would appear in the apocalyptic finale of Subutex 3: 'a surreal, passive Prospero'. And there is indeed that quality, achieved through Despentes rough rock’n’roll magic.

These inner voices do not represent a reflective hum beneath the drama of actual events; rather, they slam into us at high speed, in the form of epic tirades and paranoid monologues ... Despentes has found a way, at the level of composition and form, to enhance and even embody the qualities – hatred, alienation, anarchy of feeling – that she identifies at the centre of present-day France. Cumulatively, these different voicings – there are at least twenty main characters – convey the sense that our direct interactions with other people are a peculiar interruption to our continuous, raucous and self-consuming arias. Despentes’s writing is intelligent, outspoken, witty, shocking, propulsive and streetwise. She has a clenched-fist tremendismo style that fits perfectly with her thrash metal image. She has been fortunate in her translator, who matches her for invention and energy ... Despentes’s prose onslaught coexists with deft narrative artistry. Changes of character come with little jumps in time, forcing the reader to play catch up over certain key events ... Despentes is up here now, with the successful makers and life-shapers, not down there, and she’s not pretending otherwise. Her success is well deserved, and she has already channelled it through a touch of Horatian irony. Horace meets Kathy Acker: very Despentes.

Imagine, if you will, James Ellroy and William Gibson rewriting High Fidelity and you’re somewhere near the tone ... The plot is wild enough but the novel’s real energy, somewhere between contrarian op-ed and off-colour standup, lies in how Despentes stays out of the picture to let the story unfold through the thoughts of its large, 20-plus cast ... Despentes isn’t interested in giving you any sign of what to make of it all, relentlessly stress-testing our sense of right and wrong, whether she’s writing from the point of view of far-right youths lamenting unemployment, or a secular Muslim academic torn by his daughter’s religious devotion ... There’s a sense of mischief throughout, as if Despentes is gleefully spinning the wheel in tracing these stories ... Ultimately, it’s a dark story of how violence can be turned to entertainment for the sake of profit. It can be exhausting, but it’s also invigorating, and there isn’t really anything else like it right now.

Despentes’ fearless dissection of contemporary France through a chorus of extraordinary, often extreme voices. It’s grim out there, she attests, but, with a Gallic shrug and a mischievous humour, she also shows that there’s a kind of joy to be found in that chaos ... Despentes’ achievement is French realism rebooted: a modern-day Comédie humaine stacked with profanity and fury. It’s often deeply uncomfortable reading — that’s the point. Yet the unexpected friendships and sense of mutual concern within this wildly disparate group offer just enough hope for you to hang in there. Just don’t expect Despentes to give you a happily ever after.

... [a] kinetic translation ... The broadening of the trilogy’s themes, occasioned by its desire to encompass French current events, brings about qualities of haste and summarization. The first (and best) volume is extraordinary for its uncensored, hyperrealist character sketches of deadbeat Parisians of all stripes. Volume 3 is more of a political fable, an impression solidified by a weird and memorable coda that traces the afterlife of the 'Subutex sect' across the coming centuries all the way to the 'twilight of the third millennium.'

The problem is that these rock’n’roll raves are woefully underimagined, and come across as a bathetic travesty of resistance ... It’s one problem among many in this sagging, unkempt novel. The peripheral characters lack distinctiveness, their urban melodramas unfurling in soap operatic sameness so it’s hard to care about what’s happening. The prose is a mush of stale formulations ... The impression is of a writer always racing towards a deadline or a word-count, rarely stopping to think whether a fresher or more vital approach might be found. While there are flashes of the vulgar energy and trademark cynicism that animate Despentes’s best writing, I found myself wishing she had taken the time to write a shorter book, compressing three sloppy volumes into a lean, focused one ... Despentes’s characters are wont to accuse one another of mansplaining, but I’d gladly have had someone mansplain to me what she was getting at when, in this half-assed it’s in Collins! speculative coda, she suggests that Subutex’s Cobain-and-Cohen playlists have opened up some sort of cosmic portal by way of 'a genotypic communion of synchronous energies, corresponding waves and cardiac rhythm progressions'. The trouble is, Despentes hasn’t tried hard enough to make her readers believe even she knew what she is on about.

... this entry is very much of its time, visiting its characters’ feverish day-to-day dramas but punctuated by real-life shockwaves ... The meandering story is characteristically prolonged, but there’s something comforting in visiting each singular arc ... Perhaps it’s because no one here changes much, yet none are immune to the inevitable march of time. Life, in all its chaotic glory, goes on ... The inevitable finale to a messy, often absorbing saga about the evolution of the dispossessed.

... uneven ... Throughout, Despentes leans a bit much on cultural conflicts to advance the action, though the characters’ affinity for the music and one another remain palpable. This series ender overreaches as sociocultural commentary, but wins as a paean to the power of rock.