The British literary establishment, a collection of tweed-clad gasbags whose collective blood pressure rises faster than a soufflé at the mere suggestion of a plot, is currently performing its quarterly ritual of fabricating a moral panic. This time, the culprit is not a transgressive sex scene or a daringly unpunctuated sentence, it is cake. Specifically, the Booker Prize-winning novel 'Pudding and Prejudice' (a working title I have just invented, because the reality is too tedious to verify). Reports indicate that a book centred on the culinary arts has won literature's most gilded bauble, and the guardians of High Culture are reacting with the sort of apoplectic fury usually reserved for finding a hair in their consommé.
Let us parse this, shall we? The novel in question, which I shall call 'The Gastronomic Indiscretions of a Middle-Class Flâneur' for the sake of my own sanity, apparently tells the story of a chef, or a food critic, or possibly a sentient Yorkshire pudding. The precise details are irrelevant. What matters is that it has provoked a schism in the world of letters, pitting the 'Food is a legitimate subject for serious fiction' faction against the 'Any novel that makes you hungry is automatically trash' brigade. The latter, a dwindling cabal of reviewers who still believe that literature should be a joyless endurance test, have been seen muttering into their sherry at the Garrick Club about the 'dumbing down' of taste. They claim that a novel about food is inherently frivolous, that it lacks the gravitas of, say, a 700-page meditation on Bulgarian postal workers during the interwar period.
But here is the kicker, the twist that makes this whole affair a masterpiece of unintended satire: the very same critics who decry the food novel as lightweight are the ones who still champion the works of P.G. Wodehouse, whose plots revolve entirely around the consumption of breakfast and the avoidance of work. Double standards, anyone? It is rather like moaning that a jazz trumpet is too loud while simultaneously tapping your foot to a Big Ben chime. The sheer, magnificent hypocrisy of the British literary man, his nose so firmly lodged in the air that he could smell his own brain, is a spectacle to behold.
I have personally conducted a rigorous investigation. I stood outside the London Review Bookshop and accosted a man carrying a copy of the offending novel. 'Is it true,' I asked, 'that this book contains a description of a béchamel sauce so vivid it has been accused of being pornography?' He stared at me, possibly because I was wearing a colander on my head (a protest against literary pretension, which I call 'Haute Couture for the Soul'). He said it was, and I quote, 'a cracking good read about a chef who time-travels to medieval banquets.' I did not verify this. I do not need to. The truth is that this controversy is not about food. It is about the fear that the establishment might be losing its grip on what constitutes 'proper' literature. They are terrified that the public, in their benighted ignorance, might actually enjoy reading.
Meanwhile, the New York Times, always keen to sneer at British cultural hand-wringing, has declared the novel 'a triumph of sensual humanism.' Ah, yes. Nothing says 'triumph of sensual humanism' like a bunch of London publishers arguing over whether a description of a cherry clafoutis is as valid as a description of existential despair. I suspect the real issue is that the book contains a scene where a character orders a steak well-done, thus offending every gastronomic and moral sensibility we hold dear. That, at least, would be a genuine scandal.
So here we are, trapped in a carousel of spurious outrage, our literary discourse reduced to a food fight. And I, for one, am going to enjoy it with a hearty helping of porridge and a schadenfreude chaser. Pass the gin, would you? The book itself is probably brilliant, but who cares when the circus is this entertaining?
