The Glutton

By: A. K. Blakemore

Narrated by: Graham Halstead

Length: 11 hrs and 16 mins

Publisher's summary

A New York Times EDITORS’ CHOICE | MOST ANTICIPATED by The Guardian • Paste Magazine • LitHub • The Millions • Library Journal

From the prizewinning author of The Manningtree Witches, a subversive historical novel set during the French Revolution, inspired by a young peasant boy turned showman, said to have been tormented and driven to murder by an all-consuming appetite.

“Obscenely beautiful…Every sentence is gorgeous...Powerful and provocative.” —The New York Times Book Review

“There are few writers who can be truly likened to Hilary Mantel, but Blakemore is one.” —The Observer

1798, France. Nuns move along the dark corridors of a Versailles hospital where the young Sister Perpetué has been tasked with sitting with the patient who must always be watched. The man, gaunt, with his sallow skin and distended belly, is dying: they say he ate a golden fork, and that it’s killing him from the inside. But that’s not all—he is rumored to have done monstrous things in his attempts to sate an insatiable appetite…an appetite they say tortures him still.

Born in an impoverished village to a widowed young mother, Tarare was once overflowing with quiet affection: for the Baby Jesus and the many Saints, for his mother, for the plants and little creatures in the woods and fields around their house. He spends his days alone, observing the delicate charms of the countryside. But his world is not a gentle one—and soon, life as he knew it is violently upended. Tarare is pitched down a chaotic path through revolutionary France, left to the mercy of strangers, and increasingly, bottomlessly, ravenous.

This exhilarating, disquieting novel paints a richly imagined life for The Great Tarare, The Glutton of Lyon in 18th-century France: a world of desire, hunger and poverty; hope, chaos and survival. As in her cult hit The Manningtree Witches, Blakemore showcases her stunning lyricism and deep compassion for characters pushed to the edge of society in The Glutton, her most unputdownable work yet.

©2023 A. K. Blakemore (P)2023 Simon & Schuster - DLP

The Glutton Fails

This highly anticipated novel was touted by several online book reviewers as a work of both literary and historical fiction, genres to which I am drawn. I pre-ordered it using my next to last credit for the year. I wish I could get that credit back, but I suppose it wouldn’t be a fair demand—I listened to the entire book while loathing it, so it’s on me.

Perhaps my negative reaction is unfair as I’m judging the written work (I’ll address the poor narration later) as literary fiction as a consequence of the online book promoters’ opinions. Author A. K. Blakemore may not have ever made such a claim. While it’s true that the novel is character-driven and introspective, that’s about all it has in terms of its literary qualities as it lacks an over-arching theme (say philosophical or political) there is no character development as the protagonist is as ignorant of why his life is as it is or why life in general is as it from beginning to end. This lack of personal character development results in a lack of reflection of the human condition which to me is an essential requirement for a novel to be considered literary.

As to its place in historical fiction—just because a narrative is set in the late 18th C in the midst of the French Revolution and a myriad of historical people are mentioned and even turn up conveniently for the completely ignorant protagonist to run into (no less that Napoleon even), doesn’t make it a historical novel. What the protagonist learns about or reflects upon in this historical environment is virtually nothing and therefore, the reader gleans nothing.

As to the protagonist—the titular Glutton—his name is Tarare and he is suddenly and inexplicably
cursed with an insatiable appetite that causes him to eat and eat and eat anything organic and at times inorganic just to fill his empty stomach. If we’re to view Tarare’s empty stomach as symbolic of his empty life, soul, existence—ok, I get it, but so what? His eating frenzies only occur when they are used for a pivotal plot point. In other words, if Tarare is truly always starving and unsatisfied why are there long periods in the novel wherein he’s not about the business of gluttonous eating? The frenzies are gimmicks, deliberately described in the most grotesque manner—seemingly just for shock value—to what end? Take away the sideshow freakiness and pare down Tarare’s sad life and how he ends up where he does, and you would have the basis of a reflective character-driven novel that would allow this young man to develop an understanding of himself, but that never happens. He has no idea what the Revolution means and when he’s given a few clues, he simply does not absorb them meaningfully. Why not use the French Revolution to give him an understanding of the meaning of one’s life (try “A Tale of Two Cities” by Charles Dickens for example). Also, in what ends up as yet another meaningless storyline is the fact that Tarare is sexually attracted to men. His homosexuality is just there and, cynically I got the impression that it could help put a hashtag of LGBQT for sales purposes.

The narration of this novel also made me frustrated as the reader (Graham Halstead) never alters his delivery of any character other than to slightly lightened the voice of a woman. While the novel is set in France, he never offers the slightest French flavor. This should have been read by a French reader who is fluent in English. Every character interacting with Tarare sounds as though he (with a few she(s)) is a wise-guy hanging out with the boys in a generically contemporary place in America—say Omaha, Nebraska. This narrator should only be hired to read first-person narratives or non-fiction. He was awful. Sorry, Mr Halstead this was not a good fit for your skills.

For a while, I kept blaming the narrator for my negative reaction to the book as I was often confused as to who was speaking (truly great narrators are never guilty of that), but the more the novel moved to its conclusion, and I just couldn’t wait for it to end, the more I realized that because the novel itself was merely a series of shocking events that meant absolutely nothing, the clearer it became that no universal aspect of the human condition would be explored or exposed, therefore, rendering the work an overall failure.