The Debt to Pleasure

John Lanchester

This first person narrative is one long rumination on food told in mostly run-on but very polished sentences by a smug, eccentric, self-deluded and very charming Englishman. While on a cross-country jaunt through France, Tarquin Winot is writing what he loosely calls a cookbook, filled with recipes, culinary and cultural theories, philosophical reflections and autobiographical snippets. Tarquin is a terribly entertaining character which renders him quite likeable, which in turn makes the reader's eventual realization of the real plot of Tarquin's story that much more delicious. Yes, there is more to Tarquin than his culinary musings seem to suggest. That, of course, is what makes the novel work.

Because voice and style are so central to this novel, the best way to capture the book's essence is with an excerpt. From the chapter titled "A Luncheon On The Theme Of Curry":

"The role of curry in contemporary English life is often misunderstood. It (curry, that is, not English life) is often seen as an exercise in what the French would call "le style retro." (The French are dedicated to slang as a means of systematizing the process of inclusion and exclusion, not crudely but in those small ways which cumulatively serve the function of telling the outsider that he doesn't quite get the point - making him suffer the tiny inner defeat of not understanding a punchline, not twigging a reference; as for instance the hotelier in this decent Lorient establishment - three-starred and restaurant-rosetted, some hundred-plus kilometers from the site of our luncheon, a distance achieved thanks to the excellence of the "route nationale" system in preference to the thronged competitive death-dealing surprisingly expensive autoroutes, and also thanks to the liveliness of my light Renault, not to mention the weather, the breeze racing over one's unreluctantly discarded trilby, the pattern of sunlight changing over the wind-darkened fields like the soul of a man responding to the promptings of God -- the hotelier used the word "resto" in an attempt to outflank my command of the colloquial; as I replied "Oui, un bon resto" I poker-playishly detected in his eyes the momentary flicker of an unexpected reverse.) On this view, curry plays a nostalgic, retrogressive role in British culinary culture; the proliferation of restaurants specializing in it is a consolation prize for the loss of world-historical consequence; we are to be understood as having given away the Empire and received in return, in delayed settlement of that very considerable invoice, the street-corner tandoori house."

Now, if this passage has you snoring or irritated rather than chuckling to yourself, then this book is not for you. The entire book consists of 251 pages of same. You also have to like your humor dark.

That Lanchester is able to sustain successfully (for the most part, although there are certainly sections that get bogged down in the rhetoric) this kind of single-sided discourse for that many pages and keep it entertaining, while progressing the story with smatterings of pertinent information is an admirable feat, especially considering this was his first novel.

I'll end this review with one of my favorite passages. From the chapter titled "Roast Lamb": "Spring, optimum time of the year for suicides, is also an excellent season for the cook. Though I must say that I have often wondered whether, just as Turner invented sunsets, T.S. Eliot may have invented the seasonal surge in the incidence of people attempting to do away with themselves, and whether, before the publication of The Waste Land, April was actually, as months go, entirely benign."

You just gotta love this guy.