Customer Reviews

Kitchen Venom

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The blurb looked interesting. The author was picked as one of Granta's Best British Novelists and the book won the Somerset Maugham Book Award. So, it should have been more than an even bet that I was on to a winner. Sadly not.

"Kitchen Venom" makes a pretty dreadful read. Philip Hensher offers a particularly cynical and hateful perspective of English parliamentary life. If he is to be believed, it's one great big circus. Nobody does anything of value. The scribes sit around all day gossiping, swapping tales and visiting rent boys in the afternoons. The novel's narrative tone is also deliberately cold and distancing, as if the creatures Hensher writes about aren't worthy of being named. Those he deems worthy of specific identity aren't much better. They're all emotionally deformed. Is John's hump some kind of metaphor ? I wonder. Anyway, John, his daughters Jane and Francesca and fellow clerks Henry and Louis are all hideously repressed. Their external lives are so meaningless they have to invent and act out their fantasies to remind themselves they're alive. There's not a single dialogue between any of these main characters that sounds remotely human or real. Sometimes, mid-chapter, you even get visited by a mysterious first person narrative voice who remains unmasked. Pretentious rubbish.

If there's one single stunt Hensher pulls that works, it's the murder scene. The timing of it is so unexpected it leaves the reader in shock. But don't miss the significance of this scene. There's no room in Hensher's world for love and tenderness, only secrecy and lies, so when love rears its head and threatens to blow his cover, there can only be one outcome. Violence and death from a permanently clenched fist.

I found much to dislike in "Kitchen Venom". It's smug, unpleasant and pretentious and I couldn't wait for it to end. Sorry, but I can't in good conscience recommend it to anyone.

"That is the trouble with people; they are always different, and always refuse to fill the roles we supply for them; and yet they have their roles." (p.322) This seems to be Hensher's central thesis: the idea that public facades, the roles we are forced to play - father, husband, daughter, lover, and of course our jobs - are masks, and that most of our problems come from the gap between the role and the real. That's a valid observation, and choosing to explore it through the intersecting destinies of some minor middle-class functionaries in the British Parliament at the tail end of Thatcher's reign drives the point home quite effectively. But the seriousness of Hensher's intent is undermined by the lack of even one truly likeable character and a tone of relentless pomposity which, at moments, verges on Biblical with its cadenced repetitions. Given that the novel seems to be narrated by Margaret Thatcher, I suppose that kind of voice is intentional - but it doesn't make it any less irritating. As this voice gives way to large patches of campy humour and homosexual high jinks, the result is something like Ben Elton pretending to be T. S. Eliot pretending to be Evelyn Waugh, i.e. a bit of a mess, and not quite as funny as it thinks it is. Still, when Hensher drops his own campy mask and actually says something, he's excellent: especially on the reasoning behind duplicity, the eroticism of secrecy, and the banality of bureaucratic routines. Not without rewards.