John Saturnall’s Feast is an odd but intriguing book. Richly sensuous language describes elaborate 17th century foods and every imaginable smell. Arcane vocabulary, possibly not used in print since Jacobean times, proliferates in these descriptions. The intricacies of food preparation in a great English castle of the period are on full and detailed display while we follow John’s life story. He spends childhood in an obscure village and later arrives in Sir William’s kitchen where his nose and his past win him favor with the slightly sinister Master Cook Scovell. Then the Cromwellian Civil War stirs up enough trouble to blur the social boundaries and bring John and Sir William’s daughter Lucretia into more contact than either of them would have imagined but for the extraordinary circumstances of the war’s deprivations and violence.
At the center of this mildly confusing narrative is John Saturnall, heir to an extraordinary sense of scent. He can identify all the ingredients of a complex sauce or spiced wine just by sniffing it. From where did he inherit this heightened olfactory sense? According to his mother, a mysterious wise-woman accused of being a witch, he and she are some of Saturnus’s people, who created a feast of all the fruits and foods of the earth, a feast eaten by all at a common table as equals. “We keep the feast for all in amity,” his mother tells him shortly before she dies of frost and starvation. John finds this a hard lesson to believe, having been driven out of the village by a crazed and hateful mob—how is he supposed to prepare a feast happily for the likes of such enemies? You may have guessed by now that there is more than a hint of allegory to this novel.
There are rewards to be gained as reader of this book. Norfolk’s website says he thinks “every book is a collaboration with the people that I imagine turning the pages…a dialogue with the reader.” You’ll need to collaborate with Norfolk, to work at interpreting—your part isn’t always easy—but there are gems to be gained and the story of John and Lucretia holds the reader’s interest.