A political hunger

Revolutionary France: the people are hungry, including Tarare, born into poverty and starvation. He finds solace in the beauty of nature around his village, an innocence he maintains even after his stepfather leaves him for dead following a brutal assault. But when he wakes up he is hungrier than ever – hungry enough to eat offal, rats, corks and cutlery; even, rumour has it, babies. Scooped up by travelling conmen, he is transformed into the Great Tarare. Crowds gather as he unlocks his adder-like jaw to swallow anything thrown at him.

Inspired by a historical case, A. K. Blakemore’s second novel, The Glutton, moves between two time lines. In 1798 Tarare narrates his grisly story in hospital to a horrified young nun. Years earlier we follow Tarare through the dimming of his innocence as he is subjected to medical experiments and casual cruelty by revolutionaries who want equality and fraternity, but not with a peasant like him.

Blakemore’s debut novel, The Manningtree Witches (2021), which concerned the seventeenth-century Essex witch trials, won the Desmond Elliott prize. Here the author brings her powers of language and research to bear on a historical novel that announces from the start that it plans to break the rules. She opens with a description that seems to gestate and eat itself, like an ouroboros:

They look like grave-figures, the way they move along the dim corridors between the dim rooms. It is because their long habits hide the movements of their limbs and the muted shuffle of their feet on the bare stone tiles. Because their long habits disguise the movements of their limbs and the muted shuffle of their feet on the bare stone tiles, they look like they are gliding, as though it is some outside force that compels them along the dim corridors and between the dim rooms.

The repetitions are flagrant – and they work. So does Blakemore’s decision to break other rules of creative writing programmes, such as avoiding language that doesn’t sit naturally in a character’s mind, that risks breaking from the period or that too often prompts your reader to reach for a dictionary. The omniscient third-person narrator maintains a slippery psychic distance from the illiterate Tarare, so we have “holograph appendages of dragonflies”, “feculent moonlit”, “indifferent adumbration” and “polysaccharide breath” while hovering close to his consciousness. The novel bursts at the seams with linguistic abundance, straining at the conventions of historical fiction, a technique that fits theme and character, as Tarare and the times ask: But why must it be so?

Tarare’s hunger is political: “Isn’t that where all the trouble started? That a man must eat or die. So it seemed from where I was sitting. I know little of polity”. A doctor is surprised when Tarare is familiar with the idea of parasites. Tarare’s explanation: “They say France has a parasite” (the ruling classes). His guilelessness pierces the narrator’s stylistic zeal with simple yet burning truths. Listening to drunken revolutionaries, he learns “that the pain and starvation of the twenty-five million is contingent. Not ordained by God, at least, but by men. This was news. This was meat for thinking. All the suffering and the pain simply need not happen”.

The Glutton is a descendant of Charles Dickens’s A Tale of Two Cities, a contemporaneously set novel preoccupied with doubling and contrasts. Dickens used his endless lists to emphasize the endless hunger and terror of those revolutionary years. However, where Dickens often presents poverty as a virtue, Blakemore is less sentimental, more visceral:

They travelled from, and through, wastelands – wide red planes stamped with crack, dry as ache. Dead animals bleaching and leathering in the fields where they fell, swollen tongues and eyeballs glittering solidly with flies. Debt and default, beds of brittle hay.

A. K. Blakemore has an eye for colour that animates the past, whether it’s water “fretted silver” or “bone-yellow walls”. But, like the best historical fiction, The Glutton also prompts us to reflect on the present with a fresh perspective. This is a sensory feast that asks us what brutality we are prepared to witness, taste, hear, smell and touch. While some may find the prose overstuffed, others will relish a compelling, urgent, empathic, beautifully revolting novel that wants to kick the stuffing out of our complacency.

Kim Sherwood is a Lecturer in Creative Writing at the University of Edinburgh. Her latest novel is A Wild & True Relation, 2023

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