The Debt to Pleasure is the first novel by John Lanchester, a writer I still mainly associate with his excellent essays on economics for the London Review of Books. This is something entirely different from that, and different too from his recent decent novel Capital which I read a few years ago. This one is framed as a cookbook written by Tarquin Winot, an eccentric dilettante and food fanatic; the chapters are structured around his recipes for short seasonally-themed menus.
What begins as a rambling introduction to food in the style of Elizabeth David soon becomes increasingly digressive. The history and provenance of Wilnot himself intrudes and distracts. The tone becomes Proustian, way beyond the degree of pastiche; it’s carried off very well, though it does feel like riffing rather than earnest imitation. It’s the knowing work of someone who has read widely and is determined to demonstrate this.
‘And now I have to admit to feeling a considerable degree of relief. (There is no more powerful emotion.) These meditations on winter food have been written — and I set down these words with a sense of rabbit-brandishing, curtain-swishing-aside, non-sawn-through-female-assistant-displaying bravura — as the introductory note suggested they would be, in mid-summer, at the start of my ‘hols’. To disclose the truth in full, I have been dictating these reflections on board a ferry during an averagely rough crossing between Portsmouth and St Malo, a journey I must admit to having often found frustratingly intermediate in length…With the aid of a seductively miniaturised Japanese dictaphone I have been murmuring excoriations of English cooking while sitting in the self-service canteen amid microwaved bacon and congealing eggs; I have spoken to myself of our old flat in Bayswater while sitting on the deck and admiring the dowagerly carriage of a passing Panamanian supertanker; I have pushed through the jostling crowd in the video arcade while cudgelling myself to remember whether Mary-Theresa used jam or jelly in her Queen of Puddings, before it struck me (as I tripped over a heedlessly strewn rucksack outside the bureau de change) that she had indeed used jam but insisted on it being sieved — a refinement which, as the reader will not have been slow to notice, I have decided to omit. In all memory there is a degree of fallenness; we are all exiles from our own pasts, just as, on looking up from a book, we discover anew our banishment from the bright worlds of imagination and fantasy. A cross-channel ferry, with its overfilled ashtrays and vomiting children, is as good a place as any to reflect on the angel who stands with a flaming sword in front of the gateway to all our yesterdays.’
The reader has to at least tolerate or at best enjoy this kind of thing (as I do). The sentences ramble on for dozens of lines; the sub-clauses and semi-colons pile up; the verbiage is excessive by nature; the logorrhoea is constant. Nobody could mistake this for a real work of a troubled mind: this is a book which very much follows in the English tradition of the tricksy unreliable narrator. It is deliberately overwrought.
Above all it’s a love letter of sorts to Nabokov, and in particular to Pale Fire, perhaps his most peculiar and elusive novel. This much is signalled by the direct, almost confessional nature of the narrator’s voice to the reader, but there’s also a telling direct reference at the end of the introduction. ‘The gulls outside my window are louder than motorcycles,’ Tarquin says abruptly, breaking the spell; Charles Kinbote in Pale Fire ends his intro by declaring: ‘There is a very loud amusement park right in front of my present lodgings.’
Tarquin is up to something in the present day, but it is a long time before we figure out what he’s doing. He rakes over his family situation in some detail: his parents are dead, as is his brother; he’s been nursing a host of grudges, in particular against his only sibling’s success as a modern artist. While writing (or dictating) the book we’re reading, he’s mostly travelling around France. This is a short novel, and a slow one: we get perhaps halfway through before we realise he’s been following a young couple. Naturally his reasons for doing this are not altogether benevolent.
Tarquin would, I think, want his ideal reader to think of his narrative as being essentially timeless – or perhaps I mean ageless. The Debt to Pleasure was published in 1996, and though his story bears many of the outward signs of those tricky early modernist novels, it is in its way redolent of Britain in the nineties. This was a time when British food culture was becoming popularised in a new way. At one end there was high foodism: flash restaurants and haute cuisine that trickled down to TV chef stardom and the emergence of popular, ‘quality’ chain restaurants. All this was part of a hip international Euro-friendly outlook that enabled Tony Blair’s New Labour government to come to power a year later.
The point is that by the late 1990s, British food wasn’t just boiled beef and stodge anymore; we were capable of producing anything as good as the French or the Italians. (And we didn’t mind begging or borrowing their recipes either.) Lanchester was a part of all this — he wrote on food for The Observer newspaper in the years before this novel — and indeed this is the era in which ‘writing on food’ becomes something different (though really not so different) from 'reviewing a restaurant’. I think of those fat Saturday and Sunday papers, with their lush full-colour lifestyle supplements dedicated to recipes, restaurants and travel. Travel and food became inseparable in the popular imagination, and it’s easy to imagine a slightly cut-down version of Tarquin propping up a recipe column here and there, or dashing off a book or two (now out of print) before retiring to a quiet oblivion of booze and paid lunches with journalists and politicians.
I thought often of Keith Floyd while reading this. Partly that’s because his television programmes made him seem (like Tarquin) a flamboyant relic of a different time who happened to have made his home in the present day. Floyd was passionate about food, but his television monologues were often less about the coherent presentation of a recipe and more about the conspicuous display of his own expertise, fuelled by a steady stream of alcohol and an attitude of barely-concealed belligerence towards all contrivances necessary for a TV show to be made. (But he knew his stuff. He would have recognised instantly what Tarquin refers to in his obsessive citation of ‘an erotics of dislike’; watching an old episode of Floyd on France recently, I was surprised to find Floyd quoting from Ford Madox Ford’s bizarre, digressive book on Provence, which is itself preoccupied with what it means to love and quietly, happily loathe from a distance; and which is also a fairly direct precedent for the style of The Debt to Pleasure.)
If Pale Fire is the book to which this owes the most, by comparison it starts to look a little thin. In Nabokov’s novel, the digressions were always in the service of hidden depths – or at least the trompe l'oeil suggestion of them. There are secrets in that novel which I’ve never quite managed to uncover, even after many rereadings. Here, the narrator’s manic circumlocutions are only momentarily diverting. At times they have the feeling of a late-night Wikipedia binge: stimulating on a line-by-line basis, but patterned only according to momentary interest.
There’s not much of a bigger picture here, nor is there much in the way of a surprise. One gets the measure of the narrator’s fairly quickly. The story behind it all is thin, and it’s easy to guess the direction of travel. But as a feat of deliberate linguistic excess, the book represents a remarkable and sometimes spectacular effort. Many novels do the unreliable narrator thing quite well, but few go quite so far in their dedication to replicating such a superlative style of pointlessly ornate erudition. It is basically a ridiculous confection; but it is also capable of being very funny and very beautiful within the same breath.
