The Glutton, by A.K. Blakemore

The strangest of all things sublunary.

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There is invention on every page of The Glutton, A.K. Blakemore’s new novel. I saw only two cliches (near the end: “privilege”, “quotidian”). Some reviewers were underimpressed with Blakemore’s language—violaceous, divaricate, lustration, mesentery, benison, craquelure—but these words roll in the mouth, rather than break on our teeth, and if we have to stop and look them up, we have only improved our reading, not disjointed it. We do not read only to find the familiar, but to experience the world anew.

The test of fiction is the life of its characters. Jane Austen’s genius was to show us something new and exact about people were are familiar with; writers like Blakemore are capable of creating people we could never otherwise have conceived. Tarare is a roamer of the imagination; he lives through Blakemore’s piquant language. His varied, lamentable life—glutton, vagrant, prisoner, suspected cannibal, sad child, illiterate man—makes him a humane, sympathetic character, despite his demonic, possessing, limitless hungers, that cause no small quantity of devastation. Blakemore has written a whole, involuntary being:—I see him now, rambling on the road and gobbling at the market. We can imagine him in other scenes, other stories. He is constantly beyond language, as his appetite is beyond satisfaction. She has elevated a myth into a novel.

Had I written a book like this, I might feel justified in disliking the narrow terms on which it has been reviewed. Reviewers have prioritised arbitary “rules” of fiction, philistine personal preferences, dull reiterations of the plot, and cliches about this novel “showing us who we are”. Kurt Vonnegut may have said a novel ought to start as close to the end as possible, but that no more makes it a rule of fiction than an MP proclaiming something in Parliament makes it true; Dickens and Eliot stand in obvious contradiction to this idea. The reviewer who “wasn’t on board with the ‘carcinomic pinks’ of a sunrise” has made an error: carcinomic pink might be an adventitious image, but it is apt. Clouds often are that colour. We have all seen pictures of cancer cells, pink and globular, like cruciferous vegetables clouding out of healthy tissue. And doesn’t the gluttony grow silently inside Tarare like a cancer? Isn’t nature at once beautiful and vicious, pink and perishing? The whole essence of Blakemore’s style and her moral is to expound on what she calls “The strangest of all things sublunary.” In the face of all this, why do we wish to know that the reviewer didn’t personally care for the image? The function of criticism is to improve opinion into knowledge, not to impose comfortable philistinism onto the reading public.

Blakemore has made a significant contribution to the modern age of historical fiction. I immediately ordered her other novel, The Manningtree Witches.