John Saturnall’s Feast starts with a book within a book: it opens with an excerpt from “The Book of John Saturnall, with the Particulars of that famous Cook’s most Privy Arts, including the Receipts for his notorious Feast“: the book’s fictional protagonist, then, is both a cook and an author, and this is the story of how he got to be both. The excerpts from The Book of John Saturnall continue throughout, and are a highlight of the novel for me: I can’t vouch for the authenticity of the prose style, but the recipes are wonderfully appealing in their images: instructions for spiced honeyed wine, for example, call for straining the wine multiple times, “until the King’s Face on a Penny Coin may be seen plain on the Bottom” (2). Another recipe starts with the instruction to “Heat water in a Kettle so that you may endure to dip your Hand in but not to let it stay” (81).
The images and descriptions in general, actually, are the strongest part of this book for me: when John hears “the heavy crowns of the chestnuts shifting, the leaves rustling in a thousand dry whispers,” I can perfectly imagine the kind of crisp night the scene describes (8). And then there’s this, on the next page, which is just a delight:
He looked up at the dark line of trees and breathed in slowly, smelling wild garlic, mulched leaves, a fox den somewhere and a sweeter scent. Fruit blossom, he thought. Then that small mystery was eclipsed by a larger one. A stranger scent hid among the blossom, sweet and resinous at once. Lilies, John thought, drawing the scent deeper. Lilies mixed with pitch. (9)
John’s story is one of hardship and trouble and love and delight, from his childhood to his time as a kitchen boy to his progression to Master Cook, to his secret assignations with his the daughter of the master of the house, who he wins over, of course, with food. That said, this didn’t feel to me like a particularly plot-driven or character-driven book: the narrative jumps back and forward in time, especially early in the book, and the love story is most vivid when the characters are either eating or in bed (or both), which I guess is kind of the point. I read about John Saturnall’s Feast in the October 1st issue of the New Yorker, which said that Norfolk has a “talent for detail,” and also said that what’s most rewarding about this book is “the completeness of the physical world [Norfolk] describes,” and I would agree with that: in passages like the below, there’s such a sense of the texture of life in a particular time and place:
The packhorses tramped back through the wood. Past a chapel, the road split. They took the ox-path around the hamlet of Fainloe. Ahead, a cart piled high with firewood rocked from side to side as its wheels climbed in and out of the ruts.
‘From Upchard,’ called the driver when they overhauled his lumbering animals. ‘Bound for the Manor.’ You?’
‘Same.’
They passed chapbook seller from Forham, a cooper’s wagon with barrels from Appleby and another carrying sacks of charcoal. A man with bundles of withies on his back claimed to have walked through the marshes all the way from Zoyland. All were headed for Buckland Manor. (84-85)
The Manor is the center of the orbit of the villages around it, though it’s also something of a black hole because for years its owner has been withdrawn from social life. But that changes, and the Manor and its kitchen become the center of John’s life, too. The house is almost a character in its own right, with some particularly great passages about its chimneys and their warmth and the smells and rhythms and routines of the kitchen. That said, I didn’t like this book as much as I expected to: but it may just have been a case of it not being the right time for me to read it: the beginning felt really disjointed to me and as a result I found it slow-going/hard to get into, but I suspect that was also partly because I was floundering without my usual reading routines. (I normally read on the train to/from work, but started this right before a whole work-week of working from home.)
Leave a Reply