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One of the more curious anecdotes to emerge from the revolutionary era in late 18th-century France was that of a young peasant man named Tarrare with an extraordinary ability. Tarrare rose to fame as a travelling showman, manipulated and put on display by a motley gang of vagrants to make money out of his remarkable appetite. That appetite was not simply a lust for seismic amounts of food (at a time of near-famine for much of France’s population); he also consumed candlesticks, belts, saddles and, most gruesomely, live animals such as rats or kittens.
All would disappear into his overlarge mouth. (Once, as an experiment, he ate over 70 eggs in a single sitting.) Oddly, he never seemed to gain weight, apart from a prominently distended stomach following one vast feeding frenzy. In later years, there was an unsuccessful and terrifying attempt by the state to use his unusual talent to spy for the French against the Prussian army by ingesting missives which would later be retrieved. Afterwards, while under medical supervision in hospital, Tarrare was suspected of eating a young child. He died, probably of tuberculosis, in 1798 at the age of around 27.
It’s an irresistible subject for fiction and AK Blakemore attacks it with vigour in her second novel The Glutton. (Her first, The Manningtree Witches, centred on the 1645 Essex witch trials and won the Desmond Elliott Prize, an annual award for debut novelists in the UK.) In Blakemore’s postscript, she writes that the aim is “to offer the most believable (and therefore compelling?) iteration of a myth.” The result is a baroque triumph to parallel such classics as Rose Tremain’s Restoration and Patrick Süskind’s Perfume.
But this is no mere “fictory”. Blakemore is an assured writer with imagery to die for — a vixen is “rose-red”, April clouds are black “like the paws of spiders”. She achieves a distinctive mix of slapstick bawdiness, brutality, pathos and profound tragedy in the recounting of the life of Tarare (she chooses to spell his name with a single “r”), born into poverty in a village outside Lyon to a single mother whose occupation is variously a prostitute and wet nurse.
Blakemore portrays Tarare as an innocent truth-teller malformed by abuse. The sensitive boy wants nothing more from this life, except perhaps to see the sea. But when he is 17, his mother’s lover Nollet attempts to murder him with an axe, leaving him for dead deep in the “green belly” of the forest because Tarare had revealed the location of the salt smuggler’s contraband in a clumsy attempt to befriend a village boy.
So begins a life of wandering and a great hunger which controls and propels Tarare. His ravenousness defies medics and can be interpreted as a desperate need for love and belonging rather than power. His uncontrollable cravings match the bloodlust and propulsion which led to the overturning of the Ancien Régime and the massive groundswell against France’s divine right of kings. Sensibly, Blakemore keeps that action on the periphery, mentioned in passing or retrospectively, like the insistent beat of a not-too-distant drum.
In one of the book’s many unforgettable scenes, Tarare and his travelling companions enter a château already ransacked by republican marauders. The grime and stains left behind on the exquisite furniture and a massacre of the household’s pet doves make for a brutal foreshadowing of France’s convulsive stride into modernity. Yet ultimately Blakemore’s version of the “Hercules of the Gullet” emphasises most persuasively the yawning chasm between feast and famine, licence and denial.
The Glutton by AK Blakemore Granta £14.99, 336 pages/Scribner $28, 320 pages
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