'Eating Mammals will make you laugh, groan, retch, and ultimately be uplifted ... The world is a stranger and therefore better place now that Eating Mammals is in it..'Niall Griffiths
Barlow debuts with three novellas: capable, researched, of varying interest. The title story is doubtless the most engaging, and most awful. After WWII, with food in England still scarce, a waiter in a hotel restaurant is asked by one of the guests to concoct, however he can, an olive-oil-based fruit drink-no less than eight pints of it-and bring it to the guest's room by that evening. The waiter does so-though he'll lose his job for having commandeered the scarce ingredients-and, on delivery to the room, asks the gentleman what he needs the concoction for. The guest turns out to be none other than Michael "Cast Iron" Mulligan, professional eater, who began his career by eating great quantities of things but now eats strange kinds of things-and is this night going off to eat a chair. The waiter, fired as soon as he returns to the kitchen, becomes apprentice to Mulligan, learns how to use the big grinding machine that reduces almost anything to theoretical edibility-and carries on the tradition after Mulligan's sadly forced retirement. Readers will find for themselves what constitutes the epigone's most extraordinary and repulsive "meal." In the second story, a mutated kitten born in a Victorian workhouse (the little creature has wings) becomes a kind of catalyst for all sorts of stories, terrifying some people into madness, enchanting others, proving profitable to still more-until tale's strands are all knit together in a rather Dickensian manner. Barlow's last novella is another piece of impeccably researched Victoriana, but it also drones on-and on-as a kind of loose-knit and puffed-up tall tale as English villagers go more than all out in creating a great local festival-all to keep the workers' favorite makers of the new-fangled but much-loved pork pie from leaving town. Much to see, hear, and reminisce about in tales of a compelling historic accuracy-though the pleasures, in end, aren't deep. (Kirkus Reviews)
The strangeness of Yorkshire folk in their pie shops, circuses and workhouses is exposed in this lively collection of tall tales, told by loquacious narrators who are more Mark Twain than the taciturn Yorkshire man of tradition. Barlow's stories take as much digesting as the furniture The Great Michael Mulligan eats for the entertainment of his audience in the opening story but are more delightful. After that we find a cat with wings that enchants its various owners and a love story that grows out of the perfection of the pork pie, and is a love so great that it can only be celebrated by a procession of donkeys. These stories vividly revel in the local legends of a nineteenth-century Yorkshire. Barlow's bumptious, gregarious and jaunty characters fashion fabulously mythic tales. No other writer is writing stories as big-hearted as these fables of the Yorkshire imagination. (Kirkus UK)
Product Description
Three wonderfully original, linked novellas based on true stories from the winner of the Paris Review's Discovery Award. A new voice from Yorkshire, John Barlow has been compared to Michel Faber and T. C. Boyle. This is his first book. A winged cat wreaks havoc in a Yorkshire workhouse. An autumnal romance between two pork pie makers is celebrated with a donkey wedding. The strange career of Michael 'Cast Iron' Mulligan is revealed by his unlucky apprentice Captain Gusto -- both men who eat -- and eat anything -- for a living. These are the stories that mark the debut of one of fiction's most original and assured new voices. And, remarkably, they all are based on fact. Gypsies, Victorian businessmen, servants, masters and unwise children come together in three gothic and moving novellas of magic and deception. Largely set in the nineteenth century, they combine the satisfactions of the finest novels with a playfulness that does not forfeit humanity. With the comic sensibility of Dickens and a taste for the macabre worthy of Irvine Welsh, John Barlow is a storyteller with a unique imagination who will continue to amaze and entertain us for many years to come.
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