Food for puzzled thought
Andrew Barrow
FAIR EXCHANGE by Michele Roberts Little, Brown, £15.99, pp. 246 This short and extremely juicy historical romance starts with a French peasant woman called Louise summoning a priest. She has something dreadful to confess about her early life. Only at the end of the novel do we learn her terrible secret.
Cliff-hanging chapter-endings and con- structions seem to be one of Michele Roberts's specialities and during the first 80 or so pages of this book I was transfixed by her fine, light, almost two-dimensional technique and by her rapidly evoked por- traits of life in London and France some 200 years ago.
Then for a short while a cloud seemed to descend on the narrative and I found myself caught up in a sort of feminist dream, imprisoned in a community of preg- nant women all in a tremor about the bloody revolution taking place in Paris and the wholesome fruits of the earth that sur- round them in their rural fastness not far from the city. Oddly stilted, almost copy- book conversations about Liberty, Equality and Fraternity are followed by sickly-sweet references to 'spoonfuls of cream', 'pink scum' and 'hot juice and pulp' as our hero- ines cook themselves yet another scrump- tious meal or snack.
Yet food and its preparation, or procure- ment, must inevitably play a substantial part in a novel in which two of the strongest characters are servants Louise's counterpart in London is called Daisy — and where a great deal of the action takes place in a kitchen or kitchen garden.
I dare say that some readers, confronted with such an array of references to sultana- studded buns, chestnut porridge, stewed apples, dried sausage, fried fillets of cod and rancid rabbit may, like the pregnant girl on page 67, prefer to escape to another room and throw up, but, after a while, I found, as it were, my sea legs and became indulgent towards Michele Roberts's lus- cious style — not to mention her obsession with fruit and vegetables — and increasing- ly interested in the story she was telling.
Fair Exchange was apparently inspired by the rumour of a secret affair between William Wordsworth and Mary Woll- stonecraft. Never mind about that — the author is as much concerned with mother- hood as with female rights and with femi- ninity as much as feminism. 'Oh, I'm hopeless,' remarks a flibbertigibbet charac- ter called Fanny. 'I can't even carry a tea- tray upstairs.'
The oppressive domesticity I mentioned earlier eventually evaporates and the story regains its momentum. There are several twists and turns in store and when Louise's awful, if somewhat melodramatic, deed is finally disclosed, it will surely come as a complete surprise to most readers.
Nor is the author afraid of using cliches to speed her story along. Louise — or is it Daisy? — has 'a non-stop battle' with dirt and vermin. Other characters are 'full of ardour and hope', tears come 'coursing down' their cheeks, and bread is used `to mop up every last bit of juice'. Such yukki- ness may be faintly unsettling but is a great deal more acceptable than the author's occasional lapses into schoolgirlish twee- ness, such as when, for example, she describes a cat as 'a tabby puddle'.
Anyway, these mild disappointments are somehow counterbalanced or even justified by the author's sheer exuberance and pride in her own handiwork — in an introduction she pays particular tribute to the lady who has turned her 'messy typescript' into `beautiful word-processing' — and also by the various potent and original observa- tions which litter the text. At the end of the story, an on-going dialogue between moth- er and daughter is charmingly described as `two lines of words curving round each other like swallows in flight'. My advice to readers of this succulent but easily digested book is to take a deep breath, swallow it whole and then take flight.
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