A light collation
D. J. Taylor
THE DEVIL'S LARDER by Jim Crace
Viking Penguin, £12.99, pp. 193 ISBN 0670881457
Whatever else may be said of Jim Crace's novels, he does at least have the merit of never writing the same book twice. Quarantine (1997), the last but one, featured Our Lord in the course of his 40day sojourn in the wilderness. Being Dead (1999), its successor, starred a couple of corpses briskly decomposing on some out-of-the-way sand-dune. God and Death having been disposed of, along comes The Devil's Larder, which is about the eternally fashionable subject of food.
Long doctoral theses have presumably been written about literary attitudes to eating and drinking. Thackeray's fondness for
food/sex imagery, as evidenced in Vanity Fair and Pendennis (where the lovestruck chef Mirobolant prepares a kind of albino feast in honour of Blanche Amory's virginity), would make a study in itself, while Dickens' elaborate foodie digressions functioned as an odd kind of psychological compensation for the novelist's lack of interest in the real food that ended up on his plate. Food, in fact, is a figurative godsend to the writer, and, if nothing else, The Devil's Larder offers an exhaustive take on the fictional uses to which it can be put.
Consisting of 64 more or less discrete sections, and, like practically everything else Crace has written, set nowhere in particular, the novel roams all over the nutritional universe: neat little descriptions of scene and incident, tall stories, fragments of culinary law. A recherche restaurant, whose diners might sit down to bat meat, placenta or brains, gives way to an old woman remembering her bread-baking grandmother's habit of leaving a strip of dough out 'for the angel', and in turn to a tense account of a refugee providing smallhours room service in an anonymous hotel.
The blurb (to whose author I doff my cap) talks about the 'community thereby brought into being, but the link between the all-white wedding with a menu that includes buffalo cheese and blanched asparagus and the old man found to have Jerusalem artichokes sprouting in his gut is no more than organisational. As people who eat too much are succeeded by people who eat too little or, like the exotic restaurant-goers, things that are better avoided, it soon becomes clear that Crace, like many a novelist before him, is interested in the metaphorical angle. So we have lashings of foodlsex conflations (dinner guests playing 'strip fondue', a honeymooning couple living off the land), food as death (fisherman killed by the bacteria in his lunch-time snack) and even, in the résumé of a young man's supermarket purchases. food as a guide to personality.
All this is written up in Crace's usual arresting prose, without raising the characteristically chilly temperature of his work more than a degree or two or suggesting that the novel's controlling impulse is enough to sustain interest in what would otherwise be a collection of random ingredients. The best bits are the food as elegy selections: family history returning with the smell of the baking oven, the man who keeps his mother's soupstone, hardly noticed but for the occasions when he is 'reminded of home'. At these times the narrator runs the stone under the tap 'to bring the smells and colours out, the beach, the sea-tricked light, the gems of silica, the small boy stepping in the tumbling tide, retrieving flavours for his mother's thousand soups.' Elsewhere, though, the tendency is to surface glitter. In the end, to borrow its own critical language, The Devil's Larder resembles nothing much more than a meal of celery.
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