Like his much-praised debut, Lempriere’s Dictionary, Lawrence Norfolk’s fourth novel is a book about a book.
The text in question, assembled between ancient leather bindings and smelling of must, is a collection of receipts for a kind of pre-Christian ‘Feast’, a resonant pagan survival passed down through the generations, ‘written and rewritten’ as its ultimate compiler assures her wide-eyed son, ‘long before you and me.’
The year is 1625, and Mrs Sandall, or Saturnall, is a village wise-woman – somewhere in Bedfordshire to judge from the place-names – esteemed by her dullard neighbours for her powers of healing, but a reliable scapegoat whenever calamity strikes. Here in a post-Reformation England of religious tensions and looming civil war, the village has its own Puritan fifth column, and an outbreak of disease sees the ‘witch’ and her son driven out in the surrounding forest. Here Mrs Sandall dies, but not before bequeathing her culinary secrets to a watchful heir.
Rescued by the local priest, John is parcelled off to Buckland Hall, seat of the local magnate, and, after a job interview in which he manages to identify half-a-dozen of the flavourings of a broth of fish and lampreys, enrolled amongst its kitchen staff. Encouraged by the head cook, who once employed his mother, he soon displays an almost supernatural talent for the job, delights a visiting Charles I with a dish sabotaged by an envious fellow-worker, and finds his reward in a commission to jump-start the palate of Sir William’s disaffected daughter.
Booked to marry her boorish second cousin, Piers, as part of a scheme to keep her widowed father’s estate intact, Lady Lucretia is defiantly on hunger strike. Having ingeniously allowed her to – literally – have her cake and eat it, by providing meals within meals, so that Her Ladyship can stuff herself on the quiet while outwardly full bowlfuls are returned to the kitchen, John is given the task of preparing the wedding breakfast, only for Cromwell’s army to throw a great many carefully laid plans into chaos.
Somebody once said that to anyone who watched Rowan Atkinson and Stephen Fry disporting themselves in funny costumes a quarter of a century ago, all history is Blackadder. The same tendency applies to modern historical novels, which, however diligently researched, can sometimes tread an uncomfortably fine line between knowingness and send-up. Norfolk is sensitive to these drawbacks, never spices up the dialogue beyond the limits of credulity, while still aiming for pungency (‘Pandar Crockett at your service. His lordship’s cook. There’s me, a maid, and some fellows been scraped off the floor of an inn and kicked through Sir Hector’s livery room. Footmen, he calls them.’)
John Saturnall’s Feast winds up to its deviously plotted climax in the Restoration era, when lost hearts are reunited and a definitive version of the cook-book committed to print. Its very considerable merits beg the wide question of what makes a successful novelist these days? Naturally, talent counts for something, but most pundits would urge the necessity of keeping your name before the public. You wonder whether the gaps between Lawrence Norfolk’s novels – this one took him 12 years – are simply too pronounced to keep his reputation alive.
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