I think As Meat Loves Salt (2001) is another book that found its way into my life via an interview with Marlon James. He described Maria McCann‘s debut novel as compelling as a study in how to maintain sympathy for a protagonist that acts in some horrible ways.
As such, I expected the complexity of the main character, an imposing specimen of a man with, shall we say, ongoing anger issues. I didn’t expect it to be so meticulous in its historical recreation of 16th century England and, in some ways, As Meat Loves Salt could be read as a companion piece to Hillary Mantel‘s Wolf Hall (read before I started Reading Well). Wolf Hall is a better book, overall, but the two novels can certainly be seen as in conversation with each other: As Meat Loves Salt traces the life of a man caught up in the wars of the time, and then in an attempt to repossess land from the nobles resisting the monarchy.
The setting is incredibly fully realized, both in scope and detail, and maintains fidelity its epoch. Two examples: one, being slightly swarthy and dark-haired, the main character is often referred to as black or even Ethiopian, locating the novel shortly before the ideological notion of race had been fully created; and, two, there is a great minor discussion about a fossilized snail found in the middle of England, with theories of how the snail got there and how it turned to rock all based on Biblical foundations. Those examples are small, but they speak to how richly thick the narrative is.
And then there is the protagonist. It’s not rare in contemporary fiction to find examples of morally grey or unreliable narrators; what strikes me as a rarer accomplishment by McCann is creating a protagonist whose level of self-knowledge remains remarkably limited. You can, as a reader, see the internal conversation going off the rails, and long for the character to obtain the level of self-awareness needed to change their behavior … mostly to no avail.
It’s an interesting experience, as it fills the book with both hope and dread in equal measure, leaving it until the end to reveal which wins out.
#WhatIWishICouldDo
The challenge of recreating a historical–or a totally fictional–setting is so, so difficult. McCann consistently makes such smart choices as to what to highlight and what to let be filled in by the reader’s imagination. It’s this magical mix of the smallest detail and the broadest brushstrokes, but when it’s done well, it’s so seamless and the process of slipping into the world goes unnoticed as it happens.