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Synopsis

THE DEVIL'S LARDER is a cumulative novel in sixty-four parts, all on the subject of food. Crace's readers might learn that little is to be trusted about food from these hilarious, delightful and subversive ingredients, but they will encounter a startling and touching patchwork portrait of a community where meals are served with lashings of passion and recipes come spiced with unexpected challenges and hopes.

Reviews

Critic Review:

‘Finely written, enigmatic and profound … one of the most original novels you’ll read all year’
Independent on Sunday

‘So neat, so tasty, so entertaining … there are more delights and deeper insights to be had here than in many a serious novel from a lesser pen’
Birmingham Post

‘Brilliant and bracing’
Sunday Telegraph

'Deliciously written'
Arena

'Witty, lurid, mischievous, and in places strangely moving - without doubt his most enjoyable book'
Literary Review

'Peculiar, funny, blunt and sad all at the same time'
List

One subversive, lyrical banquet'
Observer

'Stories, memories, anecdotes, recipes, restaurant reviews, sketches of places and characters ... funny, frightening and erotic'
Times

'Delicious ... the sheer quantity of inventiveness is astonishing'
Mail on Sunday

'A literary dish fit for the gods'
Herald

Interview

Jim Crace, previous Whitbread and Guardian Fiction Award winner, talks about his remarkable book, The Devil's Larder. A startlingly original patchwork of lives, emotions and flavours, Crace creates a strange yet recognizable community thorough intertwined, wickedly imaginative snapshots. In every sense it's a devilishly delicious treat.

Your last book, Being Dead, dealt with the gradual decay of corpses, can we gather from the new book's title (The Devil's Larder) that you've chosen to move towards more savoury topics, namely food?
No, the book is not about food, cooking kitchens or restaurants; it's about our sense of selves and about how communities are stitched together through stories. I decided that I would do a patchwork portrait of a community through sixty-four stories about food. All of the tenderness, all of the sexual relationships, all of the angers and all of the illnesses are linked in that form.

I'm interested that you use the word 'stories'. There are sixty-four pieces, the shortest one being just one sentence. Do you think 'stories' is the most accurate term for what they are?
The trouble is that in English there's no difference between a novel and a collection of short stories. If you were in Italy it wouldn't be a problem. Calvino's Invisible Cities is a linked series, as is Levy's The Periodic Table. We don't have a word [for what they are] 'pieces' doesn't quite do it. The idea is that you're not reading it like a collection of short stories, where you read one and then you leave the book alone for a month. When you read all sixty-four they should add together and cumulate to have the impact of a novel. People are going to say it's not really a novel but it's got all the unities (unity of place, unity of subject, unity of time, unity of style) except one. The only unity that isn't there, and to some extent it is there a bit, is unity of character. So I think that is going to be the battle, to persuade people this is a novel and not a collection of short stories.

The Devil's Larder seems to occupy a type of imaginary territory seen in your earlier novels, a kind of 'Craceland'. Would you agree?
Some of the invented stuff from Continent is still there, like the names of trees and the names of manak beans, which is a kind of bean I've invented. I'm entertaining myself, I think. I like making stuff up. When I was a kid, I always got pleasure telling lies, particularly if I didn't get caught, particularly if I fooled lots of people. I take a lot of pleasure in inventing non-existent places in such detail that people are convinced that they exist. And, of course, the advantage of that is that it's not a real world you're showing, so everything can work, everything can contribute. I've invented something called green meat and in a realist novel, which is a mirror on the world, you can't do those things.

But, in many respects, you don't stray too far from what's real. You invent things, but at the same time you have real restaurants, and real hotels, etc...
Well, that's the trick of a good liar. A good liar who wants to tell you a lie will always wrap it up in a load of truths that you know to be true; the Prime Minister of Britain is Tony Blair and the Queen is called Elizabeth and then comes the lie, you set it in a context of real things. I think that's what people want from fiction. We're inundated with fact, and you can get fact all over the place. It's only recently that English fiction has wanted to hold a mirror up to the real world. If you think of all the fiction of the Greek myths, or the shadow puppets of Indonesia, most people like totally invented stories. There is no such thing as the cyclops, there is no such thing as a Minotaur, there are no caves in Crete, but the stories are immensely powerful because they talk about the fortunes of a community; that's what this book is trying to do. It's about the private and tender lives of a community as told through the food that it cooks and eats and dines out on.

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