The glutton A novel

Blakemore's (The Manningtree Witches, 2021) bleakly tender and grotesquely horrifying second historical novel takes its inspiration from the real-life story of "the Great Tarare," a French showman who, in the era of the French Revolution, consumed animals dead and alive, as well as cutlery, rusty nails, and possibly human flesh. Shackled to a hospital bed in his final days, Tarare narrates his life story to an appalled young nun. A sensitive youngster, he found himself afflicted by an insatiable appetite after being brutally beaten and left for dead by his stepfather. He was adopted and exploited, first by a band of con artists, and then by the French army in a war against the Prussians. Blakemore cunningly plays with the parallels between the irrepressible hunger of the "bottomless man" and the French peasants' appetite for destruction as they--long suppressed--broke out into revolution. While Blakemore, also a poet, cuts the novel's vivid depictions of degradations with lyrical depictions of the natural world, to say the novel demands strong stomachs of its readers would be an understatement.

Set in the last turbulent decades of the 18th century, Blakemore's savory second novel (after The Manningtree Witches) is loosely based on the life of the Great Tarare, a French peasant renowned for his insatiable hunger. The story begins with Tarare chained to a hospital bed near Versailles, recounting his story to an incredulous nun named Sister Perpetué. Born in 1772 near Lyon, 17-year-old Tarare escapes after being beaten and left for dead by his mother's salt-smuggling lover Nollet. He begins a new life with a band of traveling entertainers, whose enterprising leader capitalizes on Tarare's talent for devouring anything and everything: "Trotters and snouts, sod and corks, snakes and rats, mice white and browning and throbbing in mute terror as they are dangled by their tails above the mouth, scrabbling their tiny person-like hands uselessly." Tarare performs for an increasingly rebellious peasantry, who maraud throughout the countryside smearing human waste on the wrecked walls of abandoned chateaux. As war ravages Europe, Tarare becomes a soldier and a spy and ends up in the care of two doctors--one benevolent, the other cruel. When a child disappears, perhaps devoured by someone or something, Tarare vanishes. Atmospherically charged and written in eloquent and compassionate prose, this is a lusty feast. Agent: Anna Watkins, United Agents. (Oct.)

A young peasant boy's ferocious appetite fascinates and repulses his French countrymen during the revolution. Tarare is born in 1772 to a young unwed woman and, years later, he is dying while shackled to a hospital bed with only a nun for company, as rumors abound that he's a cannibal. How his life took such a tragic and grotesque turn is the crux of this novel, which breathes life into the mythology surrounding a real historical figure. Tarare is naïve as a child and limited in intelligence as a teenager, but he's deeply devoted to his mother; then his stepfather almost beats him to death after he makes an inadvertent slip to a friend about the man's smuggling business. Forced to flee, Tarare falls in with a band of vagrants headed to Paris and develops a voracious appetite, which their savvy leader quickly turns into a street performance, encouraging Tarare to eat corks, animal corpses, and buckets of entrails. After the group dissolves, Tarare joins the military in hopes of being fed, but his appetite lands him in a hospital, where doctors are fascinated by him but also suggest he might be useful to the battle against the Prussians as a spy who can swallow missives. In Blakemore's second historical novel, following The Manningtree Witches (2021), she vividly and compassionately imagines the misery of being the Glutton of Lyon and deftly questions what terrible appetites develop when people are denied love and a place in the world: "Sometimes he worries that hunger is all he is....It is in this moment, with the delicate cruciform shadow of the church's weathervane grazing at the toe of his shoe, that Tarare realises he faces down an existence of unrelenting, insatiable want. Of eternal suffering. That a void opened up underneath him when it opened up within him." In Blakemore's skilled hands, Tarare becomes complex and fully human rather than an abject horror and historical footnote. Visceral and haunting. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.