Chocolat by Joanne Harris (394pp, Doubleday, £12.99)
The premise of Joanne Harris's much-heralded new novel is that the eating of chocolate amounts to sin. Chocolate, you see, affords so much pleasure that it flies in the face of Christian morality. Chocolate is temptation, because it seduces people away from the fleshly privations advocated by the church. But it is also liberation, because the pleasure it affords helps them to let their hair down. This is a quirky idea, and the virtue of Chocolat is its quality of zanily sweet-natured goodwill.
The tale is set in Lansquenet, a rural French village. When Vianne Rocher, a mysterious and exotically well-travelled woman who does not go to church and betrays a penchant for witchy superstitions, arrives in the village and sets up a chocolate shop, "a whispering of speculation, a twitching of curtains . . ." occurs amongst its inhabitants. Soon, of course, Vianne is winning hearts and friends with her candied rose petals, her hazelnut clusters, her sympathy, her intuition and her beverages laced with liqueurs. Vianne's improbable luxury hop, the sort of place you'd expect to find in Paris or Bordeaux, brings warmth and pizzazz to narrow little Lansquenet.
Chocolat is narrated in two voices; that of Vianne, and that of the village priest. The cur is a flinty-eyed devotee of "the harsh, clean word of the Old Testament", definitely not a chocolate eater. And while Vianne constantly invokes her dead mother, a sort of new age witch, Father Reynaud ghoulishly addresses his narrative to a Father of the Church, who lies catatonic as Reynaud unburdens his murky heart.
Joanne Harris has worked a neat opposition between patriarchal Christianity (which here equals repression, hypocrisy and perverted passions) and matriarchal or pagan religion (which is here more intuitive, warm, free-spirited). From early in the novel, it is clear that we're in for some sort of showdown between the two.
Vianne is a magnet for the town's misfits. These include an abused wife, an eccentric old woman whose daughter is trying to incarcerate her in an old people's home, and a gypsy whose barge has been torched by a malevolent churchgoer (who is also husband to the abused wife).
Vianne gives them chocolate, but also nudges their lives in the right direction. When Josephine, the battered wife, threatens to flee the town, Vianne offers her chocolate. Josephine protests, "I won't have time for any chocolate if I'm to catch my bus." Have the chocolate instead of the bus, suggests Vianne. So Josephine stays and, with a little help from her friend, faces down her husband. For all its dark overtones about small town malice, Chocolat is a consoling tale.
However, the novel's portentous references to Tarot cards, black crucifixes and mediums, as well as its two-dimensional image of Christianity as the punitive and warped religion of society's oppressors, seems both arcane and crude.
"Sodom and Gomorrah through a straw," says one character knowingly as she sips at her chocolate. "Mmmmm, I think I just died and went to heaven." If Chocolat was angled differently, this line would be funny. But the novel, for all its wacky and rather charming premise, takes its visions seriously.
Clearly, chocolate stands for human kindness and consolation. But the new age overtones tend to muddy the issue. Moreover, Father Reynaud descends into such paroxysms of puritanical fervour and sweet-toothed temptation that he, at times, comes close to parody, although this does not seem to be what Harris intends. He has a dark secret which is heavily flagged up, and begins to suffer from a craving for chocolate which is, of course, mingled with a desire for Vianne. You can see it coming a mile off.
Nevertheless, the story is a jaunty, hopeful and endearing one. And the novel's showdown, which is a "Grand Festival du Chocolat" held on Easter day with a pagan chocolate statue to preside over the proceedings, is a success. Joanne Harris's new novel is an unusual, engaging fairy-tale of chocolate.
