Whatever else may be said of Jim Crace's novels, he does at least have the merit of never writing the same book twice. Quarantine (1997), the last but one, featured Our Lord in the course of his 40-day sojourn in the wilderness. Being Dead (1999), its successor, starred a couple of corpses briskly decomposing on some out-of-the-way sand-dune. God and Death having been disposed of, along comes The Devil's Larder, which is about the eternally fashionable subject of food.
Long doctoral theses have presumably been written about literary attitudes to eating and drinking. Thackeray's fondness for food/sex imagery, as evidenced in Vanity Fair and Pendennis (where the lovestruck chef Mirobolant prepares a kind of albino feast in honour of Blanche Amory's virginity), would make a study in itself, while Dickens' elaborate foodie digressions functioned as an odd kind of psychological compensation for the novelist's lack of interest in the real food that ended up on his plate. Food, in fact, is a figurative godsend to the writer, and, if nothing else, The Devil's Larder offers an exhaustive take on the fictional uses to which it can be put.
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