The 64 chapters - really 63, as the final one consists of only one word - in Jim Crace's latest novel are largely clever variations on a theme stretched thin. Simplistically the subject is food, but Crace, certainly one of the cleverest and possibly the most original of contemporary English fiction writers, is enjoying himself throughout this knowing, unsatisfying little book. For food, read appetite or need in its many forms, though not as many as one might expect.
The most easily grasped stories are the ones in which memory plays a part. As early as the second section, the narrator recalls the charming bread-making ritual initiated by her grandmother. "'This is for the angel', grandma used to say, tearing off a strip of dough for me to take into the yard. 'Leave it somewhere he can see.' "
Our childhood notions of trust and belief come together in the image of waiting for the invisible stranger. "'The angel comes to kiss it, that's all, otherwise my bread won't rise.' " Unless the birds reached the dough first, she recalls, "my grandma's bread would nearly always rise. When it didn't she would say the birds had eaten the strip of dough before the angel had had a chance to prove it with his kisses".
The narrator admits to never having seen an angel on the windowsill, "not even once". Her own children were frightened of the idea of seeing one in the yard. But the ritual, although modified, endured with those little girls, now mothers with children of their own who live too far away to visit.
Living off frozen peas and packet soup, the narrator has become too old for bread-making. It is a sad little story, but one of the more easily digested in a collection that might leave one feeling queasy at best, mildly irritated at worst. Crace is a fine, imaginative writer with a clean efficient prose style and a genius for strange images. Not quite a visionary like J.G. Ballard and not as questioning as Graham Swift, he has a politicised social conscience that bubbles throughout this book. His sense of justice is also at work. But in the stories where greed and desire backfire on the protagonists, as when a chef regularly presents dodgy mussels to difficult customers whose bad behaviour has earned them their food poisoning, the narrative tone is more annoying than funny. Surprisingly, Crace fails to explore the most obvious of appetites or desires - love, desperate or otherwise.
Many of the tales are too slight or too wry to inspire much thought. There is of course an entry devoted to the character everyone knows - the person who indulges in garlic and then wilfully sets out to share the aftermath with the world at large. A couple of aspiring young inventors freely experiment on the hapless tourists arriving at a local port.
Few of the stories revolve around food as a comfort or expression of self. Yet the one that does goes far beyond the satisfying of a need. A refugee woman works in a hotel. Her job is lowly, she collects and delivers the late-night trays to the rooms. Her complexion is ravaged by the sweets she sucks and her English extends no further than reciting the menu to guests. She eats the leftover food and "once in a while, if she's in luck", she manages to get drunk on the dregs in the many glasses left behind.
"She can recite a list of 14 whiskies. She's tasted all of them."
Fulfilment for this woman, who can't understand enough to answer questions about herself and her home village, is to dream of becoming one of those guests being waited on in a hotel bed.
In another piece, ill-suited newlyweds take off on a survival-in-the-wilderness honeymoon. It is the groom's idea. The sexually nervous young bride wants to delay discovering the physical side of marriage. What develops is a game of chess based around hunting for food. Appetite and frustration walk hand in hand. As is the case with most of the stories, there is simply no engagement with the characters.
Humankind comes out poorly, yet Crace, while commenting on our consumer-obsessed society and satirising among other things the ultimate trendy restaurant, a place so cool there is no food, only an expensive ambience, has written a performance-piece book that is neither particularly moral nor moralistic. It's too cold for that.
At its most sinister, it can leave you gasping and bewildered - albeit only briefly. One of several calmly vengeful narrators describes watching two young children, members of a family picnic that has trespassed on his land, approach his crab apple tree. It is a fine tree apparently planted by vagrant seed deposited by an animal. The narrator elaborates: "In every way but one it is a grander tree, dramatic and more showy than any of its sweeter apple cousins on the farm."
As the children approach it, after some hesitation, they pick the fruit and taste it. The narrator reports: "My mouth was watering. I saw the children shake their heads and spit. They'd never pass a crab again without their unforgetting mouths flooding with distaste."
Elsewhere, five men, all strangers to each other but "united by a single appetite", tackle a punishing walk through a jungle to reach a restaurant. "We're wading, too, of course, into the dark side of ourselves, the hungry side that knows no boundaries. The atmosphere is sexual." The menu is mysterious, forbidden and fairly sickening "Bat meat. Placenta. Brain. We are bound to contemplate, as well, the child who went astray at the weekend, the old man who has disappeared and is not missed . . . the sacrificed, the stillborn and the cadavers, the unaccounted for."
At times the prose achieves the forensic quality of the language in Crace's Being Dead (1999), a chilling exploration of a couple's dormant humanity finally asserting itself as the rampaging process of death dismantles their bodies.
One of the pieces here, in which a 10-day absence transforms a faulty freezer into a rotting mass grave of fantastical shapes, echoes that novel. Yet Crace is a thinking writer; his stories have a point. Perhaps his thesis is that appetite is far less sensual and erotic than suspected? Maybe. Either way, The Devil's Larder is ultimately evasive, rather like a flavour that eludes identification. It is instead a stylish assortment of random ideas, thrown too slickly, too knowingly at the reader to either satisfy or fully provoke.
Eileen Battersby is Literary Correspondent of The Irish Times
