So the Booker Prize has gone to a novel about food. Let us pause to digest this cultural morsel, shall we? I can already hear the celebratory clinking of prosecco glasses among the literary classes.
But before we join the chorus, let us consider what it means when the highest honour in British letters is bestowed upon a book that is, at its core, a recipe for comfort. The novel in question, a sprawling epic of spices and family feuds, has been hailed as a triumph of sensory writing. But is it a triumph of sensory writing, or a retreat into the domestic, the consumable, the essentially trivial?
The Victorians, those great builders of empire and prose, would have scoffed. They understood that literature was a battleground of ideas, not a tasting menu. The novel is about a family restaurant, its patriarch a tyrannical chef.
The narrative is organised around dishes, each chapter a course in a meal. There is a certain cleverness in this structure, to be sure. But cleverness is not always depth.
And in an age of intellectual decadence, where the public sphere is increasingly vacuous, the novel’s retreat into the kitchen feels like a symptom rather than a cure. Think of the great novels of the past. They were about love, death, war, God, the meaning of existence.
This novel is about whether to add more cardamom. The judges, of course, will defend their choice by invoking the book’s ‘richness’ and ‘complexity’. But richness is not the same as profundity.
You can have a rich stew and a shallow mind. The Booker Prize used to be a beacon of literary ambition. Now it is a gastro-pub.
The prize has a history of such turns: it has honoured experimental modernism, postcolonial discourse, and now, the gastronomic memoir. This is not to denigrate the author’s skill. The book is beautifully written, in a sensuous, almost tactile prose.
But the question remains: is this what we want from our literature? Do we want to be comforted, or challenged? The Fall of Rome was preceded by a retreat into private pleasures.
The baths, the feasts, the art of living well. Meanwhile, the barbarians were at the gates. Our barbarians are not Visigoths, but algorithms, populism, a general coarsening of discourse.
And what does our literary establishment offer? A novel about a restaurant. The timing is telling.
In a year of war, climate catastrophe, and political instability, the Booker has chosen a book that is essentially an escape. It is a literary version of a weighted blanket. I can already hear the accusations: ‘You’re being a snob.
Food is a universal language. The novel celebrates multiculturalism. It’s a story of immigration and identity.
’ Yes yes. But there is a difference between a novel that uses food as a metaphor for larger themes, and a novel that is about food. This novel belongs to the latter category.
It is about food, full stop. The immigrant story is window dressing. The heart of the book is the love of cooking.
And that is fine, as far as it goes. But the Booker Prize is supposed to go further. It is supposed to be the peak of literary achievement.
And the peak, it seems, is now a kitchen counter. What does this say about British literary tradition? It says we have become comfortable.
We have lost our nerve. We write novels that can be consumed, not engaged. We write for the palate, not the mind.
The Victorian novelists knew that literature was a moral enterprise. They sought to improve the reader, to show them a higher way. Now we seek to feed them.
The decline of a civilisation can be charted in its art. When the novel becomes a cookbook, the empire is truly dead.
