The Debt to Pleasure Read online

  Introduction

  The Debt to Pleasure is, among many other things, one of the most remarkable debut novels of recent decades. Hard to believe that, when it came out in 1996, it really was John Lanchester’s first book. Polished, assured, intricately plotted and immaculately written, it is a work any long-established novelist would be proud to claim. The narrator, Tarquin – real name Rodney – Winot, is a wonderful invention, at once appalling and appealing, if only for the pathos of his self-delusions, and lucidly, utterly, mad. He is a middle-aged gourmand, scholar and monstre damné; he is also a kind of artist, with an artist’s ambition, ruthlessness and greed for recognition. As he says himself, the real point about the conjunction of art and evil ‘is not that the megalomaniac is a failed artist but that the artist is a timid megalomaniac.’ It is a nice distinction.

  The book is one in a long, dark series that includes Diderot’s masterpiece Rameau’s Nephew, Dostoyevsky’s Notes from Underground, De Quincey’s Confessions of an Opium Eater, Gogol’s Diary of a Madman and, of course, any number of Vladimir Nabokov’s novels, from The Eye through Despair to, of course, Lolita. Indeed, Lanchester could have taken as his epigraph Humbert Humbert’s wry observation that ‘You can always count on a murderer for a fancy prose style.’ Equally, he might have echoed the Underground Man: ‘Though we [underground people] may be capable of sitting underground for forty years without saying a word, if we do come out into the world and burst out, we will talk and talk and talk . . .’

  The epigraph that Lanchester does choose, an amusing remark by Bertrand Russell about Wittgenstein’s philosophical obtuseness, is no doubt intended to alert us to the fact that we are in for an extended dose of undependable narration. In fact, however, Tarquin is blithely, if at times coyly, open about himself and his deeds and, more to the point, misdeeds. True, he employs that fancy prose style of his to blur the background, littered as it is with corpses – one is hardly giving the game away by mentioning that Tarquin/Rodney is a mass-murderer – and there are many instances of his willed blindness to actuality. In a moment of sublime though deluded self-regard he remarks that he has alwaysdisliked being called a genius, adding, with a touch of wistfulness, ‘It is fascinating to notice how quick people have been to intuit this aversion and avoid using the term.’

  It seems appropriate to mention here that the book is richly, unflaggingly and gruesomely funny.

  Tarquin begins with the cautionary admission that ‘This is not a conventional cookbook’, which is certainly true. He divides his narrative into four sections to match the seasons, and provides a menu or two appropriate to the time of year. Some of these may appear eccentric, such as

  Egg curry

  Prawn curry

  Condiments

  Mango sorbet

  but his recipes are very good. Indeed, it would not be surprising if the book has over the years collected a cult following: one can imagine house parties in Provence centring on blinis with sour cream and caviare followed by Irish stew – his is a method unknown to Ireland – and a jammy Queen of Puddings to follow. Sautéed mushrooms, however, will be avoided.

  As he writes, Tarquin is on a journey from the Hotel Splendide in Portsmouth to his house in Provence. He is travelling incognito, with shaven head and dark glasses, though it is hardly likely he will not be recognisable, or at least remarkable, since a typical outfit consists of ‘green-and-ochre checks . . . complemented, or perhaps that should be complimented, by my shirt, a pale-cerise cotton number with a fine texture showing – though only at close range and to the discerning eye – a diagonally shading pattern; I also wore a bow tie with yellow polka dots against a light-blue background, a matching display handkerchief, a fob-watch and chain and a superbly conservative pair of hand-made brown brogues.’

  What has he been up to? We hear of his parents’ demise in an accident involving an exploding gas canister, of their Norwegian cook’s ‘falling’ under a tube train, of his brother’s death from ‘accidental’ poisoning, all of which misfortunes occurred in his immediate vicinity; he is also responsible for the suicide of his ‘Cork-born, Skibbereen-raised nanny, Mary-Theresa’. On his journey through France he is shadowing a honeymoon couple, the female half of which, we discover, is Laura Tavistock, who is writing a biography of Tarquin’s late brother, Bartholomew – Barry – a world-famous sculptor whose work Tarquin dismisses as tiresomely vulgar trash. Finally, in Provence, he manoeuvres himself into an ‘accidental’ encounter with the honeymooners, and invites them to his house where they will have dinner, stay the night, and partake at breakfast of generous helpings of wild mushrooms on toast . . .

  As this summary suggests, the plot, though it is very cleverly managed, is neither here nor there. Style is all. Tarquin speaks of soups like works of art ‘in which a filigreed delicacy of local detail adds up to an agglomerated solidity of effect’. That phrase, ‘agglomerated solidity of effect’, is particularly apt to Tarquin’s own achievement. His – that is, Lanchester’s – style is modelled on that of late Nabokov, and as such is at once brilliant and unfocused, and glutted on its own richness. But this, of course, is part of the joke. As do almost all of Nabokov’s first-person narrators, Tarquin pirouettes before us, gaudy as a firebird, unaware that all the time his poor, blackened heart is on his sleeve for all to see.

  Yet what fun this mad murderer has, and we along with him, however wincing our enjoyment. Here is Tarquin deploring the colour pink, a weakness for which is ‘an infallible sign of the defective taste one associates with certain groups and individuals: the British working classes, grand French restaurateurs, Indian street poster designers and God, whose fatal susceptibility for the colour is so apparent in the most lavishly cinematic instances of his handiwork (sunsets, flamingoes).’ The writing displays a beady-eyed exactitude – ‘the napery so heavily starched that it felt as if it might, if tapped at the correct angle with a sufficiently cunning implement, shatter into fragments’ – and a fine aphoristic wit – ‘Modernism is about finding out how much you could get away with leaving out. Postmodernism is about how much you can get away with putting in.’ Also a delight is the scholarship, or cod scholarship, which Tarquin parades before us at every opportunity, with finical pride: ‘The process by which the correct level of salting is applied to Volga caviare is insufficiently well known.’

  These ‘gastro-historico-psycho-autobiographico-anthropico-philosophic lucubrations’ are a cunning commentary on art, appetite, jealousy and failure. The book is also, and perhaps essentially, a satire on and a parody of the kitchen-culture of the 1990s, the worst excesses of which are still smeared across the pages of today’s glossier magazines and the weekend supplements that weigh down the weightier broadsheets.

  Sex in those days having suddenly become dangerous – the 1990s was, after all, the Age of AIDS – the leisured classes turned for their pleasures to other passions. Food, the cooking, eating and photographing of it, became the new erotic obsession. Food-porn was everywhere. Menus read like sex manuals, while we had to hide the weekend centre-page spreads from the eyes of our children and our servants. Given the competition to find more and more exotic tastes and more and more outrageous combinations, one imagined a celebrity chef, fresh from a reading of Swift’s A Modest Proposal, peering into prams and sizing up their occupants for freshness, plumpness and succulence.

  John Lanchester, who wrote for the Guardian and was an editor on the London Review of Books, knows more than most about the inner workings of the body politic. The Debt to Pleasure, a sly introduction to his ongoing critique of the consumer society, is a lip-smackingly fine repast, expertly combined, richly spiced, and superlatively well done.

  John Banville

  In memory of my father br />
  My German engineer was very argumentative and tiresome. He wouldn’t admit that it was certain that there was not a rhinoceros in the room.

  Bertrand Russell, letter to Ottoline Morrell

  Contents

  Preface, Acknowledgement and a Note on Structure

  Winter

  A Winter Menu

  Another Winter Menu

  Spring

  Roast Lamb

  A Luncheon on the Theme of Curry

  Summer

  General Reflections

  An Apéritif

  Vegetables and Saladings

  A Selection of Cold Cuts

  Autumn

  An Aïoli

  A Breakfast

  A Barbecue

  An Omelette

  Preface, Acknowledgement and a Note on Structure

  This is not a conventional cookbook. Though I should straight away attach a disclaimer to my disclaimer and say that I have nothing but the highest regard for the traditional collection of recipes, arranged by ingredient under broad, usually geographical categories. One of the charms of the genre is that it places an admirably high premium on accuracy. The omission of a single word or a single instruction can inflict a humiliating fiasco on the unsuspecting home cook. Which of us has not completed a recipe to the letter, only to look down and see, lying unused by the side of the sauté pan, a recriminatory pile of chopped onions? One early disaster of my brother’s, making a doomed attempt to impress some hapless love object, was occasioned by the absence of the small word ‘plucked’ – he removed from the oven a roasted but full-fledged pheasant, terrible in its hot sarcophagus of feathers.

  The classic cookbook borrows features from the otherwise radically opposed genres of encyclopedia and confession. On the one hand the world categorized, diagnosed, defined, explained, alphabeticized; on the other the self laid bare, all quirks and anecdotes and personal history. All contributions to the form belong on a continuum with Larousse Gastronomique at one end and at the other . . . well, perhaps I can leave that to the reader’s imagination. One could name here any of the works of which my Provençal (English) neighbour (now dead) used to say: ‘I love cookbooks – d’you know, I read them like novels!’

  But, as I say, this is not a conventional cookbook. The presiding spirit of this work, and the primary influence on it, is the nineteenth-century culino-philosophico-autobio-graphical volume La Physiologie du Goût by the judge, soldier, violinist, language teacher, gourmand and philosopher Jean-Anthelme Brillat-Savarin, who ranks with the Marquis de Sade as one of the two great oppositional minds of the period. Brillat-Savarin, after narrowly escaping death during the French Revolution (‘the most surprising thing that has hitherto happened in the world’, according to Burke), was mayor of Belley and a judge on the post-Revolutionary supreme court in Paris. His sisters would stay in bed for three months of the year, building up strength for his annual visit. His best-known remark is probably the aphorism: ‘Tell me what you eat and I’ll tell you who you are,’ though I personally have always preferred his summing-up of a lifetime’s eating: ‘I have drawn the following inference, that the limits to pleasure are as yet neither known nor fixed.’ The original cheese named after Brillat-Savarin suffered a change of ownership in the early 1970s and is now made by Fromageries de Pansey in the Champagne area; contemporary editions of the cheese strike many observers as disappointingly underpowered.

  I must also acknowledge a more immediate inspiration. Over the years, many people have pleaded with me to commit to paper my thoughts on the subject of food. Indeed, the words ‘Why don’t you write a book about it?’, uttered in an admittedly wide variety of tones and inflections, have come to possess something of the quality of a mantra – one tending to be provoked by a disquisition of mine on, for instance, the composition of an authoritative cassoulet, or Victorian techniques for baking hedgehogs in clay. I have always had a certain resistance to the notion of publishing my own physiologie du goût, on the grounds that I did not want to distract attention from my artistic work in other media. Recently, however, I have come to believe that no harm will accrue from bringing before the public something which – while not composed casually or ‘with the left hand’ – none the less claims to be nothing more than a shaving from the master’s workbench.

  This work came to be written – this long-toyed-with suggestion suddenly crystallized into factuality – principally thanks to my young collaborator Laura Tavistock. She is by far the most charming, most persuasive and most recent of those who have felt themselves urged to urge me to this project. If I have not dedicated this book to her, that is because, at this stage of the joint enterprise on which Ms Tavistock and I are engaged, such a gesture might seem (to use a phrase of hers) ‘a bit previous’.

  I have falsified one or two proper names and place names. For instance, ‘Mary-Theresa’ and ‘Mitthaug’ are close approximations rather than mean and mere identicalities. (Does that word exist? It does now.) St-Eustache is not St-Eustache. The Hotel Splendide is not the Hotel Splendide.

  About the architecture of this book. Its organization is based on the times and places of its composition. In the late middle of summer I decided to take a short holiday and travel southwards through France, which is, as the reader will learn, my spiritual (and, for a portion of the year, actual) homeland. I resolved that I would jot down my thoughts on the subject of food as I went, taking my cue from the places and events around me as well as from my own memories, dreams, reflections, the whole simmering together, synergistically exchanging savours and essences like some ideal daube. This will, I hope, give the book a serendipitous, ambulatory and yet progressive structure. One consequence of the decision to take this course is that I am, as I set down these sentences, in the unusual position of writing my Preface before the rest of my narrative. We are all familiar with the after-the-fact tone – weary, self-justificatory, aggrieved, apologetic – shared by ship’s captains appearing before boards of inquiry to explain how they came to run their vessels aground and by authors composing Forewords.

  Finally: I have decided that, wherever possible, the primary vehicle for the transmission of my culinary reflections will be the menu. These menus shall be arranged seasonally. It seems to me that the menu lies close to the heart of the human impulse to order, to beauty, to pattern. It draws on the original chthonic upwelling that underlies all art. A menu can embody the anthropology of a culture, or the psychology of an individual; it can be a biography, a cultural history, a lexicon; it speaks to the sociology, psychology and biology of its creator and its audience and, of course, to their geographical location; it can be a way of knowledge, a path, an inspiration, a Tao, an ordering, a shaping, a manifestation, a talisman, an injunction, a memory, a fantasy, a consolation, an allusion, an illusion, an evasion, an assertion, a seduction, a prayer, a summoning, an incantation murmured under the breath as the torchlights sink lower and the forest looms taller and the wolves howl louder and the fire prepares for its submission to the encroaching dark.

  I’m not sure that this would be my choice for a honeymoon hotel. The gulls outside my window are louder than motorcycles.

  Tarquin Winot

  Hotel Splendide, Portsmouth

  Winter

  TWO MENUS

  A Winter Menu

  Winston Churchill was fond of saying that the Chinese ideogram for ‘crisis’ is composed of the two characters which separately mean ‘danger’ and ‘opportunity’.

  Winter presents the cook with a similar combination of threat and chance. It is, perhaps, winter that is responsible for a certain brutalization of the British national palate and a concomitant affection for riotous sweet-and-sour combinations, aggressive pickles, pungent sauces and ketchups. More on this later. But the threat of winter is also, put simply, that of an over-reliance on stodge. Northern European readers will need no further elaboration: the stodge term, the stodge concept, covers a familiar universe of inept nursery food, hostile saturated fats and i
ntentful carbohydrates. (There is a sinister genius in the very name Brown Windsor Soup.) It is a style of cooking which has attained its apotheosis in England’s public schools; and though I myself was spared the horrors of such an education – my parents, correctly judging my nature to be too fine-grained and sensitive, employed a succession of private tutors – I have vivid memories of my one or two visits to my brother during his incarceration in various gulags.

  I remember the last of these safaris with particular clarity. I was eleven years old. My brother, then seventeen and on the brink of his final expulsion, was resident in a boarding school my father described as ‘towards the top of the second division’. I think my parents had gone to the school in an attempt to persuade the headmaster not to expel Bartholomew, or perhaps he had won some dreary school art award. In any case, we were ‘given the tour’. One of its most impressing features was the dormitory in which my brother slept. This was heated by a single knobbly metal pipe, painted white in ignorance of the laws of physics, or in a conscious attempt to defy them, or in a deliberate effort to make the room even colder. The pipe had no effect whatsoever on the ambient temperature – Bartholomew and the nineteen other boys in the dormitory would regularly wake to find a generous layer of ice on the inside of the windows – but was itself so hot that any skin contact with it resulted instantaneously in severe burns. The fact that school-uniform socks were mandatorily only of ankle length meant that the possibility of flesh-to-pipe contact was formidably high, so that (according to Bartholomew) the smell of burnt epidermis was a familiar feature of school life.

  We had been invited to lunch. A long, low, panelled room, perfectly decent architecturally, housed a dozen trestle tables, each of which held what seemed to be an impossibly large number of noisy boys. The walls were hung with bad sludge-coloured paintings of defunct headmasters, a procession interrupted only by the most recent portrait, which was a large black-and-white photograph of a handsome sadist in an ermine-trimmed MA gown, and the one before it, which suggested either that the artist was a tragicomically inept doctrinaire Cubist or that Mr R. B. Fenner-Crossway, MA, was in reality a dyspeptic pattern of mauve rhomboids. A gong was struck as we entered; the boys stood in a prurient, scrutinizing silence as my parents and I, attached to a straggling procession of staff members, progressed the length of the hall to the high table, set laterally across the room. My brother was embarrassedly in tow. I could feel sweat behind my knees. A hulking Aryan prefect figure, an obvious thug, bully and teacher’s favourite, spoke words of Latin benediction into the hush.