Tower and Town, August 2023 (view the full edition)A Good ReadI think I've written before that I'm a complete sucker for anything based on the Arthurian legends. Malory, Tennyson, Roger Lancelyn Green, T H White, Rosemary Sutcliff, Simon Armitage, Lerner and Loewe, endless films and TV adaptations, all grist to my not-very-discriminating mill. I even once opened my mind so far that it twanged like a lute string and attempted to read a Young Adult version, featuring a transgender Arthur in outer space. (No, really. Yes, it was every bit as bad as it sounds.) So naturally, I fell on Bliss and Blunder by Victoria Gosling, in which Arthur and Guinevere are a famously wealthy couple, owners of an innovative and hugely successful tech business. The 'knights' are a cohort of trusted colleagues, old school friends and in a couple of cases profoundly damaged veterans of the war in Afghanistan. Set around a lightly fictionalised Marlborough and Avebury, it is, as the original stories were, all about secrets, betrayal, revenge, and the use and misuse of power, with just the slightest hint of other-worldly deep-time magic. I'm also highly susceptible every now and again to a Chinese meal, all lurid colours and MSG, from a fiercely strip-lit formica-countered cracked-tiled takeaway establishment. But I do know that no actual Chinese person would even recognise such a meal as food, let alone as an example of one of the most complex, subtle and diverse cuisines on the planet. Fuchsia Dunlop's Invitation to a Banquet is the result of years of research, travel and enthusiastic eating. It's not a cookery book, there are no recipes, just extensive and fluently imparted knowledge. It's history, anthropology, travel writing and descriptions of food, techniques, culinary identity and ingredients. Describing taste and scent in writing is really difficult but the author brilliantly evokes both. I'm still too Western not to recoil slightly at some of the dishes she describes, but I'm sure that's my loss. Seasonal eating with local ingredients, fermentation, all those trendy things - the Chinese got there first. I devoured this book (oh, ha ha), it gives so much food for thought (I know, sorry), but I will be force-feeding this to everyone. All right, I really will stop now, but I won't shut up about this book. And I will not call my take-away meal 'Chinese food' ever again. Quick mention for Late LighTby Michael Malay, nature writing and memoir by an Indonesian/Australian author, about encountering England, learning about alien (to him) plants and wildlife, and a fresh view on what is, to us, commonplace. Debby Guest |