As Meat Loves Salt (Harvest Original) - Softcover

Maria McCann

Softcover

ISBN 10: 015601226X ISBN 13: 9780156012263

Publisher: Harvest/HBJ Book, 2003

Synopsis

In the seventeenth century, the English Revolution is under way. The nation, seething with religious and political discontent, has erupted into violence and terror. Jacob Cullen and his fellow soldiers dream of rebuilding their lives when the fighting is over. But the shattering events of war will overtake them.
A darkly erotic tale of passion and obsession, As Meat Loves Salt is a gripping portrait of England beset by war. It is also a moving portrait of a man on the brink of madness. Hailed as a masterpiece, this is a novel by a most original new voice in fiction.

A Harvest Original

About this title

Review:

Maria McCann enters the fray of 1640s England and Civil War with considerable gusto in this ambitious first novel. A coldly gruesome murder committed by her youthful narrator opens his account, and the bloody siege of his lover's Diggers colony ends it. Narrator Jacob Cullen, educated but now a servant, flees his royalist household, taking his bride of just an hour and his brother. In a second act of terrible brutality, he beats and rapes his wife. Becoming a pikeman in Cromwell's New Model Army, he befriends Christopher Ferris, an idealist disaffected by the Army and in search of a less tainted freedom. And so the two desert and head for London and the pleasures of Cheapside--and each other. Jacob becomes "a fornicator of unnatural appetite, in thrall to an Atheist... I was in love". But Ferris is intent on establishing a commune, a prospect Jacob reviles, yet to keep his lover he has no choice but to join the motley band.

McCann's writing is rich in detail and colour--the muck and mud of battlefields, London's crowded stench, and the colonists' back-breaking work on the land; she manoeuvres her large cast of characters adeptly, and her dialogue is nicely pithy. The flaw that blights the plot is a yawning gap of credibility: Jacob's acts of violence--the murder, the rape and much more--which occur almost out of the blue simply don't fit his persona. His motives are too thin; nor is he presented as an unbridled brute masquerading as sanity itself. So how are we to "read" him? Even Ferris's accusation--"A man's own evil is his devil and yours, Jacob, is mastery"--suggests too little and comes too late. Jacob's pivotal place in the narrative is discredited by the lack of psychic underpinning and this mars an otherwise robust debut. --Ruth Petrie

Review:

PRAISE FOR AS MEAT LOVES SALT

"Absorbing and historically meticulous . . . a fat, juicy masterpiece."--The Economist

"McCann, a marvelous storyteller, does not disappoint. Forbidden sensuality is searingly described by chiaroscuro candlelight. Rich in secrets and surprises, this novel has its own fierce poetry."--The Independent (London)

"A story tense with anguish, intimacy and shame . . . it imaginatively re-creates the mentality of a society racked by war and intoxicated by radical new ideas of freedom and chance. . . . This is an intriguing and disturbing first novel which lingers in the mind."--The Times Literary Supplement

About this edition

• Publisher: Harvest/HBJ Book
• Publication date: 2003
• ISBN 10: 015601226X
• ISBN 13: 9780156012263
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 584