The Last Banquet by Jonathan Grimwood – review

The year is 1723, the place rural France; a small boy sits eating beetles on a dungheap in the courtyard of the derelict chateau where his parents lie dead. From the outset, Jean-Marie d'Aumout, the protagonist of Jonathan Grimwood's fantastical history The Last Banquet, is many things, but most notably – and usefully – an outsider. The orphan of nobles, the infant Jean-Marie is eating insects not because he is starving, but because the taste interests him: already he is an epicurean of extraordinary boldness. Like Patrick Süskind's murderous Grenouille in Perfume, his supersensitivity to taste, it is intimated, is to be theme, motive, ornament and philosophical disquisition in a life that spans the turbulent century leading up to the French revolution.

Taken up by a vicomte, Jean-Marie is reintroduced into society by means of repressive boarding school (where he learns what a woman tastes like), military academy (where he finds comrades among the nobility and turns his hand to recipes for explosions), and acts of derring-do among hostile peasants that win him an aristocratic wife. Fearlessly intelligent and restless, at Versailles he becomes master of the king's menagerie (a useful sideline, providing him with exotic meats for recipes such as braised flamingo tongue or three-snake bouillabaisse). He acquires a chateau, sires children, becomes a diplomat, and is abducted as a spy.

In tandem with his culinary investigations, Jean-Marie also experiments with women of various flavours (a pedestal-mounted wife, a wholesome wet-nurse, an incestuous, Rousseau-reading masochist) and – in keeping with the times – with social reform. He crosses paths with the great figures of his day: he writes dictionary entries for Diderot, he discusses agrarian economy with Voltaire and racial equality with Benjamin Franklin, he corresponds on the subject of appetite with the Marquis de Sade. And all the time the outsider treads a careful path through dangerous times, as peasant unrest turns to full-throated revolution, and Jean-Marie prepares for his last banquet, and the breaking of the last taboo.

There is much to enjoy in this book: it is racily picaresque, energetic and clever. History is deftly and diligently interposed with the details of a life, while Jean-Marie's character is carefully elaborated so as to illustrate the various aspects of a vivid era: pre-revolutionary France, with its philosophers and gourmets and interestingly depraved nobility. His kinship with animals chimes with Rousseau's natural man; his outsider status and his scientific objectivity allow him to observe the decay of a great society without sinking along with it. Grimwood, who writes science fiction and fantasy as Jon Courtenay Grimwood, has a powerfully visceral sense of France and its history. On the smells and tastes and sounds of a country saturated in gluttony, he is marvellous: thyme, milk, sweat and dung are all vividly present on the page. On occasion the writing flares into brilliance, producing some memorable descriptions. Grimwood evokes the scent of a Corsican hillside; he writes of monks on St Michel hovering "at the back of the dilapidated cathedral like unhappy ghosts" and the tawdry, crowded stink of Versailles.

Overall, though, The Last Banquet has significant failings: it is no Perfume, nor a Jamrach's Menagerie, both comparisons made by its publishers. Stylistically, it has a curious butch woodenness, and as a result its intelligence reads as artificiality. In particular, our hero's epicureanism is inconsistent; it is neither rhapsodic enough nor sufficiently integral to his character to make it seem anything but tacked on, with the addition of occasional outlandish recipes. It is bewilderingly undermined, too, when he can say, early on, "One pig, one mouse, one owl tastes much like another." In which case – why bother?

And although the final scenes – in which Jean-Marie finds himself in a boarded-up chateau alongside the blind tiger he has raised from a cub, the mob at the gates – are powerfully alive, they feel like a deceit, because the essential problem throughout is that Jean-Marie is hard to like. From his juvenile experiments on animals (textbook psychopath) to his fondness for pompous philosophical monologues (textbook Frenchman), his chilliness means that his wives, friends and lovers appear and evaporate without any great sense of their being missed. This deprives the novel of any real dramatic tension – a lack for which even the imminence of revolution cannot compensate. "I felt the tears well up and wondered how much of this was my fault," says Jean-Marie at one moment of great loss. "There would be time for that later." Except there never is.