Barney Broom - Haute Cuisine

Rating: 2/5

Review:
Very disappointing

I'm afraid I didn't get on with this book at all. It is a good idea for a satire, but to work it has to be well done and I'm afraid this isn't at all well done.

The basic notion is a good one: a chef secretly begins to serve human flesh in a restaurant and when word gets out it becomes the latest culinary sensation among the foodie set. It's an excellent basis for a really biting satire of the way fashion grips and controls some people, however harmful or repellent the fashion may be. To work, though, it needs finesse, an ability to create believable characters and situations to carry the central grotesqueness, and an ability to tell a well-paced and well-written story. I'm sorry to say that Barney Broom manages none of these things.

The characters, particularly the villains, are the crudest of stereotypes who wouldn't be out of place in a pantomime. The drunken, venal and sexually voracious aunt/guardian, for example, or the phoney chef de cuisine are so crudely painted as to be ludicrous. To make matters worse, things like the chef's behaviour are unsubtly described but even then this isn't left to speak for itself and we are constantly told that he is a buffoon, that he is a phoney, that he looks ridiculous and so on. Broom is a film-maker and really needs to remember the film-maker's adage "Show, don't tell," because this sort of thing is simply patronising and annoying. The narrative also lacks any subtlety or finesse - for example the whole point of satire is to portray something grotesque but to leave the grotesqueness to speak for itself, but we have to be told (after it has been made face-slappingly obvious) that "the world had plainly gone completely insane". It's like people who ruin a joke by insisting on explaining it to you afterward.

The prose, too, is stilted. It is full of things like "...to the untrained eye the kitchen became chaotic but it was very far from being such" which reads very awkwardly, and although it would be unfair to say that it is cliché-ridden, it is full of stale phrases like "little did anyone know that...", "there were problems from the word go", "it blew the whole thing sky high" and so on. I found it a struggle to get to the end of the book.

I won't go on. I am genuinely sorry to have to be so critical, especially of a first novel, because I much prefer to encourage where I can, but I really didn't think this was very good. Quite a few people have enjoyed this much more than I did and you might, too, but personally I can't recommend it.