The Glutton by A. K. Blakemore (2023)

I’ve never referred to a group of starlings as a murmuration, of crows as a murder, or of apes as a shrewdness, and neither have bird-watchers, zoologists, or ecologists. These terms are mostly just cutesy meme-material, but what’s worse is the claim that they’re the correct or proper ones to use, just because someone in the fifteenth century, in a fanciful frame of mind, happened to systematically record — or invent — a specialist vocabulary supposedly used in the medieval hunting tradition of the English nobility (though it seems doubtful that they were hunting apes).

“Did you know that the collective noun for owls is actually parliament?”

No, that’s not how language works.

On the other hand, I do defer to convention and talk of a flock of starlings, a school of fish, and a pride of lions, and so, I imagine, do many bird-watchers, zoologists, and ecologists. These are equally as fanciful and twee as the others, and the fact is that for whatever reason they did catch on. However, this does not support the claim that the more obscure curiosities, like parliament and shrewdness, are “correct”. As far as any word use is correct, it’s insofar as it conforms to the relevant conventions.

But I’ve had a partial change of heart. The correctness claim is silly, of course, but I now realize that these terms can be used to good effect. Unlike me, A. K. Blakemore is a poet, not a grumpy old man, so she’s open to their individual colours and connotations:

Black flies rove in thick swarms over this unprecedented feast, murmurations almost solid …

… having cast a sceptical look around the dusty murder of vagrants gathered in his yard …

They fill the sky all around, like a powder, whirling in erratic murmuration between the thatch and the rosy firmament.

He closes his fist around a murder of gorged leeches. They stretch like jerky between his teeth and when they burst release a metal flavour, an imbrued juice of diseased blood, on to his tongue, dripping down his chin, the mouthparts crunchy —

This is obviously not obedience to correct terminology — according to the recorded “terms of venery” from the middle ages, Blakemore has misapplied them. Rather, it is sensory and conceptual evocation, nodding to the terms’ current popularity as linguistic curios but using them how she likes.

These are just a few examples of the inventiveness that runs right through Blakemore’s second novel, The Glutton. At its heart it’s a beautifully written and powerful work of historical fiction, but while it’s not experimental in any essential way, her strange metaphors and images, her often obscure vocabulary, and the flashes of magic and horror turn it into something special. It is weird, but unlike a lot of “weird fiction,” the language is poetically exact, almost never clichéd or fey. Its observational precision reminded me of Nabokov even before I found out that she was a fan, such as here:

So you have come here — the aide-de-camp widens his arms to indicate the conceptual dimensions of his “here” — from a village near to Lyon because you believe in liberty, and in honour, and will proudly shed blood for the patrie?

Tarare

The novel is a fictionalization of the life of the famous Tarare (sometimes Tarrare), who lived and died in revolutionary France and who was known for his insatiable appetite and the ability to eat vast amounts of just about anything. It is structured by a frame narrative in which dying Tarare, kept in isolation and shackled to a bed in a hospital at Versailles, tells the story of his life to Sister Perpetué, a young nurse and nun tasked with the job of watching over him. Having heard the horrifying rumours, she sees Tarare initially as a kind of monster, but quickly becomes engrossed in his story, as we do too.

The tale he tells begins with his birth and takes us up to his arrival at Versailles. It’s a sort of picaresque adventure, as we follow his journey from a peasant village near Lyon all the way to Paris, while the chaos of revolution spreads. We spend a lot of time in Tarare’s head, and we get to know him. From a young age he is curious, sensitive, and open-hearted, and even before the near-fatal beating that produces his hyperphagia, we sympathize with him completely, an odd but innocent child in a cynical, brutal world.

But our sympathy doesn’t remain complete. Over the course of the story Tarare is beaten, abused, manipulated and exploited, and he begins to seem fated to it, ultimately always an aberration without a place in the world, always a step beyond the pale. The kinder characters are only kind up to a point. Lozeau brings Tarare into his group of vagabond misfits mainly just to use as a sideshow freak; and Doctor Dupuis, the first person in the unfortunate young man’s life to show him genuine care, gradually grows to hate Tarare for the outrage of his very existence — not despite but because of his suffering.

It is left to Blakemore to redress the wrongs that were done to him, but even she can only take it so far. We are often on Tarare’s side, seeing the world from his point of view, but we cannot overcome his monstrousness entirely. This can get too much while we inhabit his consciousness, and relief is provided by switching to the points of view of Sister Perpetué and Doctor Dupuis, to bring us back to the normally human, allowing us to see Tarare from a safe distance as the wretched and monstrous Other.

Revolution

Blakemore, like Tarare himself, is ambivalent about the French Revolution. The world of the novel is passionate, but not compassionate. While we are confronted with the injustices of the old system, we are also made to face up to the mad horrors unleashed in its destruction.

Whatever Tarare might think about it all, and whatever he might want to do about it, he is always excluded. He has an awakening class-consciousness:

He learned that the pain and starvation of the twenty-five million is contingent. Not ordained by God, at least, but by men. This was news. This was meat for thinking.

But due to his condition he cannot properly engage either in thought or in action, so there is no place for him even in a world in which everyone has to take a stand somewhere:

No revolution will reform Tarare. Topple kings and queens right into his open mouth, even, and watch him ask for more.

It’s an insult to a good book to fish for allegories and symbols, but there are, at the very least, parallels and resonances that are worth looking at. Tarare could be seen to personify the contradictions and divisions of society, such that the attempted murder which seems to cause his hyperphagia is the revolutionary event that ignites the conflagration of conflict between his virtuous higher self and his now supercharged appetite. And France in the period is hungry, after a series of disastrous harvests, damaging winters, and rises in the price of basic foods. That such a time should produce a creature of infinite hunger is a delicious perversity.

Tragically queasy

I had a unique experience in reading this novel. I felt a kind of emotional queasiness, sometimes wanting to look away, to put the book down and never pick it up again. But it wasn’t the disgusting descriptions of Tarare’s feeding frenzies or even the acts of cruelty and violence. Rather, it was the knowledge that Tarare would be painfully hungry for the whole of the book and the whole of his life. The tragic fatal flaw is not hidden, waiting to bring down the hero when least expected; throughout the story, it is no easier for us than it is for Tarare to forget about his hunger.

So in the novel’s first half I could never quite relax and enjoy it. I couldn’t settle into the flow of the story as I usually would with a picaresque adventure. Looking back, I think this is part of the novel’s prickly fascination. In any case, even though things get a lot worse for Tarare in the later parts of the novel, by that time I was hooked.

Is it experimental?

I said before that the novel is not essentially experimental, but maybe I’m wrong. The thoughts of Tarare, which are essential to the book, are rendered with an artistry and sophistication that doesn’t fit with what we know about him, an illiterate peasant who has grown up in poverty surrounded by cruelty. Blakemore signals this to the reader in a kind of aside:

These are not the words that Tarare uses to think about it, but this is what he thinks.

I love these metafictional clues. Here the omniscient storyteller finally admits, a long way into the novel, that her version of Tarare’s thoughts, while not quite a fiction, is at least an artifice.

But what are we to make of it? In the normal run of things, omniscient third person narration narrates the events and characters of the story, maintaining the pretence of Olympian knowledge. But occasionally it breaks self-consciously into a direct address to the reader, or, even more rarely, drops the pretence entirely and admits that the story is made up, thus revealing the author behind the narrator. So there is (1) narrating the events and characters within the story; (2) saying something about the story itself, while maintaining the pretence; and (3) saying something about the story itself, without maintaining the pretence. The quoted line above seems to be doing both (2) and (3): owning up to one pretence only to maintain another, namely that the narrator has literally read the mind of a man who existed over two hundred years ago.

And the artifice is not only in the imagining of Tarare’s thoughts, but also in the telling of his story: I referred above to “the tale he tells,” but we do not get to read his words, to hear his tale directly. Blakemore instead fashions it in her own way and from an Olympian viewpoint, dispensing with his own first-person account.

At every level, we not only feel, but feel that we are being made to feel, the presence of the narrator and author shaping the story to produce certain desired responses, such as sympathy, disgust, anger, and so on. And despite this, we do respond in those ways.

In drawing our attention to the mediation necessarily involved in omniscient narration, while simultaneously insisting on real access, the narrator emphasizes Tarare’s distance from us, his isolation and his irremediable alienation from humanity — but without revealing him to be a mere character.

Whether or not it helps here to use the term postmodernism, Blakemore does seem to maintain, along with postmodern John Barth, that it’s stories all the way down, as one of her characters says:

Vidal says not everything has to be a story. Lozeau says yes, my friend, everything does. Everything is.

On the other hand, it’s not just postmodern trickery — it’s technique in the service of humane motivations. The sophisticized language of Tarare’s thoughts as expressed by the narrator could be seen to celebrate humanity, just by doing justice to the innocent wonder and loving spirit that can exist among the most degraded people.

Is Tarare incoherent?

Some readers have complained that the Tarare depicted in the frame narrative doesn’t fit with the Tarare of the central story. I certainly felt this incongruity too: in the inner story, even after the onset of his hyperphagia, he is innocent, loving, and hopeful; but in the frame narrative, as he talks to Sister Perpetué, he is mocking and cynical. For most of the novel, these two Tarares cannot be reconciled, but I think it is resolved towards the end, when Tarare is finally broken, his loss of innocence complete. I won’t give away everything that happens, but a series of events brings him to complete degradation, leaving him scornful of himself and the whole world.

He walks and he doesn’t stop walking when he becomes aware of the rider approaching on his left-hand. The shadow of the horse cools the side of his sunburnt face.

Tarare, says Doctor Dupuis. Where are you going?

To Hell, replies Tarare, his eyes fixed on the horizon.

Conclusion

I expect to read The Glutton again. Despite the discomfort I mentioned, it’s a lot of fun, because the author is obviously having fun. It has an addictive verve and it keeps you on your toes with startling word choices and verbal dissonances. It brilliantly evokes the poverty of peasant life and the delirious vitality of a world turned upside down.

I highlighted dozens of sentences and passages when I was reading, but I’ll just pick a couple. I loved the following description of Protestantism from the Catholic perspective, when Tarare makes the mistake of crossing himself while he shares a meal with a family of German country folk.

They think he is a heretic, do they? And so? Perhaps they are the heretics. Denuding and drabbing his fabulous God, making a bumpkin of him.

There’s one insight that really stood out for me personally, because I’ve been occasionally preoccupied with the question for years. In my twenties and thirties I began to wonder why the recollection of earlier events in my life made me sad, even if those events had been happy. It took me a long time to understand what might seem obvious, namely that I was grieving for the irrecoverable loss of the past. Blakemore describes Tarare’s reaction to the news of the king’s execution:

And Tarare weeps. He has no shits to give for any Bourbon or Capet, but still he weeps. Because of time and all it has torn down and robbed from him. The gilt rubbed from the surface of the world. Because of time and all it has borne away, beyond his reach.

Recommended.