Book review: Lust and cannibalism in World War II

Book: Nourishment
Gerard Woodward
Picador
340 pages

When a book like Gerard Woodward’s Nourishment arrives in the mail, it’s essential to recall the ancient adage that advises potential readers against judging the contents of a book by its cover. For the dust jacket, featuring the sultry profile of a beautiful, heavily made-up woman, lips parted in desire as she gazes at the title, engenders all sorts of expectations: that this is a book about sex, beauty, hunger and desire. The tagline helpfully informs us that the author has been, in the past, short-listed for the prestigious Whitbread award and the Man Booker prize.

But the reader is quick to discover that, despite the misleading profile on the book cover, Tory Pace, the heroine of this novel, is not beautiful. In fact, she is a “failure” at beauty. As the novel opens, at the time of WWII, she is a tired, worn-out worker at a Gelatine factory, subject to constant nagging from her mother and the bombs of the London Blitz. Her three children have been evacuated to the country-side. Her husband, a soldier in the British army, is presumed missing in action, until she receives a letter from him and is relieved to discover that he is alive in a German POW camp. It’s this letter that gets the plot unfolding, for Tory’s relief transforms soon into horror and shock. Her husband has written to ask her for a “dirty letter....filthy, full of all the dirtiest words and deeds that [she] can think of.” Her quest to comply with her husband’s wishes provides the premise for Nourishment.

Although Woodward ventures into original, proscribed territory — cannibalism, infidelity, dirty letters and public lavatories, his humour is puerile and his writing a trifle fatuous. For example, here’s a passage that recounts how Tory’s mother stumbles across a joint of meat in a bombed butcher’s shop (which we discover later may have been a part of the dead butcher): “the meat looked excellent. A lovely deep, almost purply pink, [sic] with a nice hairless skin covering a layer of snow-white fat. It seemed to cry out, ‘Roast me, roast me.’”

The characters themselves are unexciting. Tory’s husband, Donald, the ex-POW, is not only difficult to sympathise with, but is positively repulsive. The character with the most potential is Tom, Tory’s brilliant son, and the narrative starts to get interesting when it explores his story. But Tom soon departs from the narrative, never to return. Instead, Tory Pace develops the (somewhat predictable) ambition of becoming a writer and embarks on composing a work where the heroine is a faintly disguised version of herself.

There are other, more absorbing works that engage with similar themes — sex, desire, writerly concerns and war. Regeneration, the first novel in Pat Barker’s acclaimed trilogy on WWI, explores the relationship between the soldier-poets, Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon, as they are treated for post-traumatic stress disorder brought on by their war experiences. Barker’s novels offer a fascinating, provocative discussion on patriotism, sexuality, mental health and the role of literature. Ian McEwan’s disturbing novel Atonement, too, explores sex, the possibilities of fiction, and the darker aspects of the imagination against the backdrop of war.

With darkly comic situations and the self-reflexive nature of Tory’s literary ambitions, Woodward has squarely pegged his novel as a work of literary fiction. Yet Nourishment fails to live up to the promises and the accolades proclaimed on its cover. Nor does it reflect on its intriguing theme:  nourishment — in its various forms, as it applies to both sex and food — is simply a motif that appears and reappears in the lives of the novel’s characters.