Playing Sardines
Michele Roberts Virago Press, 196pp, £9.99
ISBN 1860498140
Food, sex and God was the title of Michele Roberts's earlier book of essays, and signalled her central preoccupations as a writer. Food, sex and God are indeed the main themes of her arresting new collection of stories, Playing Sardines. Her approach to each is adventurous, quirky and erotic. Both food and sex, in the orthodox forms of communion and marriage, are sacraments in the Catholic Church. I read Roberts as a Catholic writer, still wrestling with the language and symbols of her religion. Her passionate commitment to women, our sexuality and freedom, compromises and complicates her relation to Catholicism.
In one of her most remarkable novels, Impossible Saints, Roberts works through these contradictions and constraints in the fantastical lives of different women. All the Christian virtues - humility, chastity, forgiveness - become poison in women's lives. We turn into sanctimonious doormats. Better to embrace the seven deadlies. We need our anger, jealousy and lust. Roberts knows this, and she says so, but she has never abandoned the iconography and structures of the faith. Thus, in the stories in this collection, the Virgin still watches and protects; and in "The Miracle", an Italian prayer to St Anthony actually works.
There are several delicate and suggestive tales of the supernatural in this book. In "Fluency", a London flaneur, roaming the City, finds that she has made an imaginative leap to Paris. In "The Easter Egg Hunt", a French child, jealous of her baby brother, is sent to stay with her grandparents. But the grandfather is dying. The visionary conclusion, in which the child sees her dead grand- parent hiding the Easter eggs in the garden, is both disturbing and convincing.
Roberts is never sentimental. Her stories contain several successful and engaging murderers who get their man and get away with the crime (one of the more ladylike murderers, in "Lists", flies off to Rio with the parish priest). And she calmly describes children planning to do away with their siblings.
Women writers have often used the short story to experiment. Roberts tries on different registers, modes and styles as she would different dresses and shoes. There are two very funny pastiche novelettes in miniature: "Blathering Frights" (Wuthering Heights) and "A Bodice Rips". I laughed out loud while reading these.
The dominant mood of the collection is sensual and lavish. And the motif that unites the stories is food. The book itself is like a meal, demonstrating the virtuosity and variety of the cook's talents. In "The Cookery Lesson", a mad stalker becomes obsessed with a TV cook. The meals become more deadly, elaborate and delicious. But it is in the title story, "Playing Sardines", that Roberts makes explicit the connection between cooking and writing. "I used to read this cookery book at night after my husband had fallen asleep, savouring its poetry, its precise vocabulary. Recipes were indeed like poems . . ." So writing, that process of making something sensuous and beautiful, is carried on after dark, when our husbands are well out of it.
Patricia Duncker's novel, James Miranda Barry, is published by Picador (£6.99)
Post this article to
We want to encourage people to comment on our content and to exchange views with other readers and hope this will be done on a courteous basis. However, if you encounter posts which are offensive please let us know by emailing comments@newstatesman.co.uk and we will take swift action where necessary.
