“OK, so, you can hopefully arrange some time off,” says the consultant to Anita, the central figure in Ross Raisin’s deeply thought out and beautifully unshowy fourth novel. Her husband’s early onset dementia will mean emotional incontinence, aggression, loss of recognition. It’s assumed that Anita’s job will shrink into the far corners of her new life as a carer. From the consultant’s perspective she’s only a cook. “No – I’m a chef,” she says, firmly. That’s what she is and what she does, and it matters as much as the doctor’s work matters to him. A Hunger is the story of how Anita confronts the conflicting demands of work and care, how she weighs past wrongs and present duties, and how she faces the desperately difficult questions that dominate the small hours of so many carers whose partners have asked not to be left suffering.
Ross Raisin made his name in 2008 with God’s Own Country, vividly narrated in the strong Yorkshire dialect of a disturbed young man adrift. It was so pungent that readers expected more from that same rural world. Instead, in Waterline (2011) we got a Clyde shipbuilder enduring the loneliness of grief. Then came A Natural (2017), with its subtly sustained portrait of a gay footballer carrying on his career in the lower leagues where the spotlights don’t reach. Each time, the immersion in particular circumstances is so complete that I have caught myself wondering if Raisin is a farmer, a shipbuilder, a footballer, a carer. Then I remember with relief that I don’t need to know: he is a novelist.
Anita in A Hunger has always found satisfaction in her work, from her first teaching job and time as a canteen dinner lady, to the years of fierce effort pushing her way up the kitchen hierarchy, cooking “immaculately murdered wild birds” for drunken businessmen, until at last she is senior sous chef at a respected London restaurant. At every turn she has been made to feel guilty for doing what she loves, or held back from it altogether. Her controlling husband has left the parenting of two children in her hands, never hesitating to put in the hours for his own promotion while she looks after everything at home. The standards are double by default. “Do you know how long I have worked to get us where we are?” rants Patrick when Anita proposes to risk some of their capital to start a business. “About as long as me, at a guess,” comes the answer, in Anita’s preferred tone of understated resistance. She is no one’s victim. But Patrick’s punishment of her has gone beyond casual degradation to an extraordinary kind of persecution.
So when she is left changing the incontinence pads, it is for a man who has hardly earned her generosity. But does “earning” have anything to do with it? Perhaps the economies of care and sacrifice do not behave like that. Anita moves between frustration, compassion, fraught exhaustion and a love that “punches blindly” – because, yes, they have loved each other, this husband and wife.
Episodes from the past are interleaved with the unfolding situation, so that we come to understand the experiences that shape Anita’s judgments now. It’s all told in the present tense, with the past pressing up against the surface, equally immediate in its hurts and joys. In truth there’s more incident and characterisation than we might require. A few suggestive glimpses could have sufficed for Peter, say, the gently patient vegetable seller with whom a new relationship is forming. But Raisin’s fullness is part of his honouring of the “ordinary” stories he tells. These are complicated lives, not amenable to symbolic hints or summings up.
The fact that Anita has been a carer before is almost too much for one novel to hold, yet it rings absolutely true. As a girl she was responsible for feeding, dressing and emotionally supporting her beloved and loving mother. Terribly trapped and out of options, her mother asked several times for money to buy pills that would “help”, releasing her from misery. The memory of it accompanies all Anita’s thinking, in her 50s, about what she should and shouldn’t do for her husband.
Not surprisingly, the kitchen becomes a precious place where she can both think and close off thought. She appreciates the “concentrated peace of prep” when everyone is absorbed in allotted tasks. She has held her own in kitchens run on Gordon Ramsay principles of adrenaline and macho language, and her reward is now to manage her team differently. There’s the pleasure of things done well (“viscosity just right”), and she thrills to the honed choreography of dinner service. The routine hum of it makes a kind of music:
“Three minutes on table twelve! Anton – duck happy?”
“Duck happy, Chef.”
“Sauce happy, Jack?”
“Sauce happy, Chef.”
Raisin has never dealt overtly in stylistic experiment, but what he does with language is bold when he mobilises the technical slang and in-jokes of colleagues working together – on the football pitch in A Natural or perfecting dishes here in A Hunger.
The rich subject matter he finds by the fridges and on the metal at “the pass” where food is plated and checked for service makes one realise the degree to which work is still undercharted territory in literary fiction. A hundred years after Ulysses there have been few novels about advertising salesmen. Francis Spufford’s pitch-perfect study of printers, teachers and middling executives in 2021’s Light Perpetual felt rare and welcome. Raisin is another writer giving literature new jobs.
His own central job in A Hunger, though, is to set the rhythms and challenges of the kitchen alongside those of illness, marriage, motherhood and care. It’s a giant task. If the novel sometimes feels a little laboured, it is a superb achievement nonetheless. This is fiction put to work on some of the hardest and, alas, most commonplace ethical dilemmas about value, choice and freedom.
• A Hunger by Ross Raisin is published by Jonathan Cape (£16.99). To support the Guardian and Observer, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
