Five Quarters of the Orange
Joanne Harris
432pp, Doubleday, £12.99
Buy it at a discount at BOL
First Chocolat , then Blackberry Wine , now oranges. If the next is called Walnut , Joanne Harris will have the full dessert. A preoccupation with food makes her list of child characters in this latest bulletin from the French countryside read like an index to a recipe book: Cassis, Reine-Claude, Framboise, Pistache, Noisette, P che and Prune (Blackcurrant, Greengage, Raspberry, Pistachio, Hazelnut, Peach and Plum - guaranteed to be bullied).
The heroine, Framboise, tells a twin-track story of a village up the river Loire from Angers. Long ago in the war, she and her brother and sister were involved in a little innocent collaboration (more black market than death squads) that went horribly wrong. From trading scraps of information for Gauloises, they spiralled through witnessing German rumpy-pumpy in the village bar (with one dead body on the pavement) to fleeing the parish pursued by a mob who were convinced that the children's mother had informed on the apparent slaying of a German soldier by the Résistance.
Of course, nothing is quite what it seems. Thirty years later, the now-widowed Framboise returns incognito to her birthplace, restores the burnt-out farmhouse, opens a sensationally successful creperie and kicks off another saga. This time, her nephew and his wife, a failing food writer, are out to get a piece of her culinary action by inducing her to share with them her inheritance: a book of grandmother's recipes intertwined with gnomic musings on the events of the war years. So the device of the struggling caterer, first used in Chocolat , is brushed off for Anjou. Nephew plots to smother her trade; old woman fights back. She wins in the end, though not without yielding the secrets of her past to her neighbours.
Harris writes at length. The story has (just) enough action to avoid tedium and induce some sort of tension, but the pace is jog rather than sprint and the relief at getting to the end is that of arrival, not understanding. The apparent charm of the author - Chocolat was a runaway success - seems to lie in her evocation of a French never-never land where things may occasionally turn nasty, but saccharine always flows.
Her big problem is her plotting. She is not especially cerebral, and developments hinge on events rather than emotions, so those events have to ring true to be believed. They don't. Take granny's recipes, for instance. We are told that the hopeless food-writer would kill for them, that they made the reputation of Framboise's cr perie, that Paris restaurant critics were bouleversés by their glory. But cuisine bourgeoise , which is what she cooked, has no secrets: everyone knows the rules for clafoutis or greengage tart. All the stupid niece-in-law had to do was go out and buy Tante Marie in the Kitchen .
Or consider the heroine, in the first part of the yarn a nine-year-old Anjou peasant with the emotional precocity of a 1990s teenager (and, what's more, already menstruating). This waif creates devious stratagems to induce migraines in her mother (this is where the orange of the title comes in); pursues a pike of mythic dimensions with the determination of a great white hunter; and falls for a German soldier (with not a lot of puppy in the love). What a monster - yet still a wonder in the author's eyes.
Underpinning the action is food. Presumably this is what sold Chocolat, too: food equals good. (But nouvelle cuisine equals highly unreliable.) You must be all right if you can make rillettes, stuff a pike, and get your jams and jellies to set. This seems a crushingly simple view of life. Not all good cooks are lovely people, and those who use cooking to make themselves martyrs to the cause of love and affection are usually odious manipulators. But I suspect that this is Harris's secret weapon. Every reader of a cookery column is in reality plotting his or her glorification on the altar of domestic bliss, and this novel reinforces the notion.
