The Glutton by A.K. Blakemore | Book Review | Granta

 

From the moment I found out about it, I knew I wanted to read The Glutton by A.K. Blakemore. It's surprising to then try and put into words why. As someone who doesn't read much fiction, when I do, I need it to be absolutely up to my high-horse standards: after all, when you read fiction, you read beautifully made-up lies. Beautifully made-up, but lies nevertheless. (Am I too negative? Perhaps.) And yet I had no doubt about it: The Manningtree Witches, Blakemore's previous novel, I found to be pretty much flawless too. 

The Glutton is a grotesque story, set in late 18th century France, where the terrors of war and economic depression influence every aspect of life, public and private. 'The price of bread rises,' chimes the menacing refrain. It's a haunting shadow throughout the book, as the plot develops, and masterfully widens the scope of its main focus – that is, Tarare: the boy with a strange name, the bastard, the great, the terrible. 

It's a tale in a tale, as dying Tarare narrates his life in the convent hospital where he came to die, to a curious nun, in the night. He is repulsive, not one bit endearing: that's what makes this an outstanding performance in the grotesque, because one's curiousity is instanly piqued. We want to know why. How. Whether. It's his story, from a violent birth through violent childhood and, to finish things off, a violent adulthood – though perhaps that's too strong a word, because the dying Tarare is only twenty-seven. The characters revolving around him are colourful and repulsive in equal measure: his salt-smuggling stepdad, his band of bandit brothers, his whore lover. 

Blakemore leans into the disgusting, seems to relish it and yet somehow that's exactly what I want her to do. It's a dirty book, sticky, slicked with grease and oil and semen, and blood, of course, a lot of it. Whether that's the blood of the animals that the Great Tarare, with his dislocated jaw, swallows up (bones and all), or the people dying like flies around him, is of no importance. She tortures her characters, and seems to delight in it – and somehow I enjoy it too. It makes one feels rotten, but also makes the reading a deliciously sick experience.

Blakemore speaks to all five senses as she conveys plot and atmosphere, and is excellent at it. Stench prevails throughout. The imagery is so vivid, yet so poetic that her style could be no-one else's. Her vocabulary is broad – to some, jarringly so, though to me doesn't feel gloating (though an LRB feature quotes ‘feculent’, ‘violaceous’, ‘sapor’, ‘asterisms’, ‘garniture’, ‘verdigris’, ‘entheogen’, ‘ectomorph’, ‘raptorine’, ‘ascarids’, ‘gleets’, ‘craquelure’, ‘priapic’ and ‘autogamous’ in one breath and yes, put like that, it does feel like a lot). I can see how this cacophony of mellifluous words, perhaps unnecessary, might annoy someone as much as it impresses me. I gather a vague sense most of the time, but I google certain words that jump out at me, not because I can't make out their meaning from the context, but because I feel she deliberately chose them, placed them with care. The least I can do, I feel, is to explore at least some of them.

It is no surprise that Blakemore has previously pubished poetry collections, because her narrative flows, convulses, expands, circles. I love her occasional use of repetition, both within a paragraph and throughout the book. It foreshadows and lends musicality to the text. By what seems like mundane repetitiveness, to me it seems she hefts gravitas onto sentences. Her craft is to be admired.

And what of the Glutton himself? Though Blakemore sometimes makes us wobble in our antipathy for Tarare, on the whole I think she wants us to dislike him. This is not a tale of understanding the misunderstood: it feels more like being one of the crowd, watching Tarare swallow leather belts and jewellery (and then some), equally repulsed and excited. I revel in it.

The only issue I have is with the novel's timing and timeline. We know, from the present-day snippets, that Tarare is twenty-seven when he dies; and we know he only spends a summer with his vagabond crew of thieves. So as I progress with the book, and find my right hand holding an increasingly thinning half, I'm worried about the ending. I do find the pacing struggles a bit – huge gaps in time with little detail, then comparatively short events before we zoom out again – but the ultimate events are harrowing enough to make the ending a relief, as I'm sure the author intended it to be.

I hope whatever comes next from Blakemore will be just as mysterious, dark and entertaining as her first two novels.