15 Dec 2012 02:37:33
Seventeen-year-old Zac is a loser from a "shitkicking suburb" of Melbourne, Australia. After he commits a violent crime, he is given a choice: borstal or cook school. He chooses cook school – a young offenders' rehabilitation scheme based on a farm and funded by Head Chef, a celebrity also from the wrong side of the tracks. In true coming-of-age style, the young offenders learn to chop a carrot ("you've never seen anything so funny in all your life some people had never chopped a vegetable before I reckon some of them had never even seen one"). They cook a basic meal with some freshly slaughtered chook ("I mean chicken I mean bird") and some simple herbs and vegetables from the organic kitchen garden. Eventually they learn that "If your mum's making lemon risotto with her own stock serving it with a rocket salad I'm sorry don't fool yourself into thinking she's sophisticated we've moved on risotto is a decade old at least I wouldn't walk through the door of a restaurant with risotto on the menu your mum's a sheep." Welcome to the gastronomic revolution. The idea is for the students to impress Head Chef, but he rarely puts in an appearance. When he does, he teaches Zac his philosophy: "Power through service this is your motto. By subjugating ourselves we become strong. And to what do we subjugate ourselves? To public taste. To whim. To folly. To whatever looks and smells new. We bow to the fickle and frivolous we are servants of all that is decadent excessive unnecessary." There are no commas in this book, no moments to breathe in the cut-throat world of high finance and late capitalism that it both satirises and gruesomely dramatises. Satire usually involves exaggeration, but in the world of fine dining, at a time when Heston Blumenthal has recently experimented with using tampons as palate cleansers, there is no such thing. Much of this book seems grotesque, but don't be fooled into thinking it's not real.
When Head Chef turns up in the middle of the night demanding offal to feed the investors and prostitutes he has with him, Zac soon realises that not everyone is as ambitious as he is. He slaughters two lambs so he can make fresh cervelle au beurre noisette (brains in butter). He doesn't mind standing in the "humble spot" to serve others, because "I wanted no matter how humiliating it might be to prove I was better." Troubled sous chef Fabian wants to go back to traditional peasant cooking, but Zac knows he wants nothing to do with peasants ever again. "I don't want to plate up bold and honest flavours grow apples and peaches with grubs I want to plate slivers of hand-reared flesh with garnishes of baby things."
Having become first a vegetarian and then a vegan (now a bit lapsed) on the basis of books I have reviewed, I did worry about what this one might do to me. It has certainly put me off fine dining. By page 88 the narrator is not only slaughtering his own grain-fed lambs, but force-feeding pregnant ewes grain, rosemary, pinot noir and sea salt to enhance the flavour of their offspring. Given that the book is 243 pages long and appears, at least at first, to work on the principle of escalation, I could not imagine what horrors Zac would be plating up by the end. But each time you think you've reached the limits of this thought-provoking and brilliant novel, it just gets deeper.
The structure is nowhere near as obvious as it first seems, and there is no murder and mayhem on the farm. Instead, Zac, having aced cook school, gets a job as a house-cook in a Melbourne suburb. He abandons his monstrous farming practices, at least for a while, and the novel invites us to consider the larger context for the gastronomic revolution, and the connection between global economics and the first-world, privileged high street where organic greengrocers have to get loans to give credit to their rich patrons. With everything going bust around him, and with his fate as a servant of the sort Head Chef had suggested pretty clear, Zac – ambitious, focused, weirdly lovable despite everything – needs to do something really bold. And the inevitable, but still very shocking, ending is exactly right, like a smear of perfect narrative jus.
