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    John Saturnall's Feast
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    John Saturnall's Feast
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    John Saturnall's Feast
    Ebook450 pages4 hours

    John Saturnall's Feast

    By Lawrence Norfolk

    3.5/5

    ()

    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this ebook

    From the bestselling author of Lemprière's Dictionary, Lawrence Norfolk is back with an astounding novel of seventeeth-century life, love and war; the story of an orphan who becomes the greatest cook of his age.

    The village of Buckland, 1625. A boy and his mother run for their lives. Behind them a mob chants of witchcraft. Taking refuge among the trees of Buccla's Wood, the mother opens her book and tells her son of an ancient Feast kept in secret down the generations. But as exquisite dishes rise from the page, the ground beneath them freezes. That winter, the boy's mother dies.

    Taken to Buckland Manor, John is put to work in the house's vast subterranean kitchens where his talent raises him from the scullery to the great house above. A complex dish served to King Charles brings him before Lady Lucretia Fremantle, the headstrong daughter of the house. He must tempt her from her fast.

    But both encounters will imperil him. As the Civil War begins and the New Order's fanatical soldiers march, John and Lucretia are thrown together into a passionate struggle for survival. To keep all he holds most dear, John must realise his mother's vision. He must serve the Saturnall Feast.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherBloomsbury Publishing
    Release dateSep 13, 2012
    ISBN9781408833292
    Unavailable
    John Saturnall's Feast
    Author

    Lawrence Norfolk

    Lawrence Norfolk is the bestselling author of Lemprière's Dictionary, The Pope's Rhinoceros and In the Shape of a Boar, three literary historical novels which have been translated into 34 languages. He was born in London in 1963 but moved with his parents to Iraq shortly after. They were evacuated following the Six Day War in 1967 and he grew up in the West Country of England. He is the winner of the Somerset Maugham Award and the Budapest Festival Prize for Literature and his work has been shortlisted for the IMPAC Prize, the James Tait Black Memorial Award and the Wingate/Jewish Quarterly Prize for Literature. In 1992 he was listed as one of Granta magazine's 20 'Best of Young British Writers'. In the same year he reported on the war in Bosnia for News magazine of Austria. His journalism and reviews have appeared in newspapers and magazines throughout Europe and America. He currently lives in London.

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    Reviews for John Saturnall's Feast

    3.5/5

    129 ratings18 reviews

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    • 4/5
      I'd looked forward to reading this one for a long time, but it didn't end up doing much of anything for me, I'm sorry to say. Just couldn't keep my interest in the fairly boring plot.
    • 2/5
      Not one of my favorites.
    • 3/5
      An English village, not long before the English Civil War. A woman lives there with her young son. She is a 'wise woman', who the villagers come to with their worse ailments, but her knowledge also makes them suspicious, and with puritanism spreading across the land fingers are pointed to her as a witch. She teaches her son about the days before religion told us that life should be hard and the relations between men and women shameful, and quietly makes arrangements for him to be taken in as a kitchen boy at the manor house, after she is gone. From kitchen boy John works his way up to cook, but now the Civil War is here and the kitchen staff have to accompany their lord to war, while the lord's headstrong daughter is left to defend the manor from the Roundheads.There is a lot in this book that I ought to have liked. I'm interested in the civil war, in food, in the theme of pleasure/hedonism vs puritanism/religion, and I've enjoyed the ambition of Norfolk's earlier books. This one, unfortunately, did not engage me. The themes were a bit buried, perhaps, and I couldn't make myself really care about the characters or what happened to them. Not a terrible read, but nothing very special - except perhaps for the descriptions of the food of the time, which turns out to have been incredibly ornate:A great flood of aromas swamped the noise, thick as soup and foaming with flavours: powdery sugars and crystallised fruit, dank slabs of beef and boiling cabbage, sweating onions and steaming beets. Fronts of fresh-baked bread rolled forward then sweeter cakes. Behind the whiffs of roasting capons and braising bacon came the great smoke-blackened hams which hung in the hearth. Fish was poaching somewhere in a savoury liquor at once sweet and tart, its aromas braided in twirling spirals.
    • 4/5
      John Sandall (or Saturnall) has a gift for recognizing all the ingredients in a dish by taste or scent. As 17th century Somerset is gripped by puritanical fervour, he and his goodwife mother are driven out as witches. But John's demon tastebuds make him the perfect cook. Taken in at the local Manor and trained in their kitchens, he must weather new challenges as England slides into Civil War. It's a leisurely journey of grace notes rather than action and there's little originality in what passes for the base plot, but what a delightful dish this is: historical food porn with a dash of romance and religion. John is a satisfyingly complex character, and I enjoyed the willful yet dutiful Lady Lucretia as his foil. Most of the supporting cast are stereotypes at best, particularly the antagonists (the cowardly drunk chevalier; the lustful lay preacher; the mean kitchen boy), but there is also an array of warm-hearted good folk (I had a particular soft spot for Josh Palewick).Not entirely what I expected, but thoroughly enjoyable and well-served. But the joy here is in the food. If you're not fascinated by historical banqueting, you probably shouldn't bother.
    • 2/5
      Norfolk's novel is beautifully presented as a physical object, with a striking cover and lovely woodblock prints. The depiction of the 17th century kitchen is fascinating, too. There are many sensual details, whether it's the slick feel of the greasy troughs that the scullery boys must scrape out as they clean the plates, or the spit and hiss of the juice dripping from a pig as it is slowly turned over the fire. The reader really gets a feel of the military precision in which a kitchen of that era was run. Pity it's welded to an utterly banal plot that either slows to a crawl or skims too fast, and with many jolting shifts in time and point-of-view to add to the headache. Wild-eyed fanatical puritans and drunken, cowardly suitors without a smidgen of grey--you'll find them here, too. There's the usual nonsense of the almost-raped virgin tumbling into bed with her rescuer mere moments after the assault and some poorly-explained mystical tosh about a long-lost feast from the people from the hollow hills that the main character wishes to regain. Or something.
    • 3/5
      OMNOMNOM! Ich steh ja auf exzessive Essensbeschreibungen. Viel mehr passiert da auch nicht, reicht aber aus.
    • 4/5
      Set in 17th Century England, the story tells us of the life of John Saturnall. The tale takes place before, during and after the Civil War but its not a story about the Civil War - its an adventure in food and love. A really enjoyable book to read - well written and well presented.
    • 5/5
      Written for food lovers with a liking towards history. Mysterious and magical yet realistic. Highly developed plot and envelops the reader. Strong female characters.
      Physical book is stunning; heavy paper, beautiful font, etc.
    • 4/5
      "John Saturnall's Feast" (JSF) was a really fun and worthwhile book! In interest and enjoyment, JSF's vivid descriptions of the extensive below-stairs labors required to prepare elaborate 17C banquets and, indeed, just to feed the Household of a great manor, would beat watching Top Chef episodes any day. More than that, though, I enjoyed the book's celebration of humanist values. Fortunately for us all, the kinds of suspicion and deep antipathies which established religions were wont to heap on humanism, as depicted in JSF, have eased up considerably if not completely. Norfolk is an excellent prose stylist, who obviously did extensive homework in order to capture the precise words, gestalt, and events of 17C England. In addition, the book's narrative arc was smooth and pretty easy to follow. Even if some characters seemed more like caricatures rather than real people, Norfolk drew the protagonists in a sympathetic manner and with a light enough touch to allow readers to fill in their own details. JSF could be a good beach blanket escapist read, but only if you also keep a dictionary (or Internet appliance) close at hand for looking up the book's many interestingly obscure words.
    • 3/5
      The food details are well researched and the book is well written but the plot is banal and the treatment of the Civil War simplistic.
    • 5/5
      A historical novel set during the English Civil War. Descriptions of culinary delights and the methods that produce them in a period kitchen. A lyrical love story. An ancient legend. Any one of these elements might have hooked me on this book, but put all together they made a great reading experience. John and his mother are forced from their home by Puritan villagers who believe she's a witch. After his mother's death in the forest, John is sent to the manor where his mother once worked, and taken on as a kitchen boy. John's gift for recognizing scents and tastes soon bring him to attention of Mister Scovell, the head of the manor's kitchens, and soon enough, the attention of the King. But when the king is overthrown and John goes to war with the lord of the manor, will anything ever be the same again?
    • 5/5
      ‘John Saturnall’s Feast’ is set near the start of the English Civil War. John is the child of a woman who is a sort of outcast; an herbalist and midwife, she lives on the outskirts of the village and doesn’t go to church. Of course this means she is thought of as a witch. When a plague runs through the village, she is blamed and they are run out of town. They take up living in a deserted house in the woods, living on late season fruit and chestnuts. She is dying, of both starvation and disease, but before she dies, she teaches John to read from a book about a strange feast held in Buccla’s Wood. It encompasses every form of food; fish, fowl, vegetables, sweets, mammals are all included, and the feast is for everyone, not just the rich as is the way of the land at the time. At her wish, after her death, he is taken to Buckland Manor where he is put to work in the vast kitchens. John’s life changes totally. Used to being alone or with only a couple of people, he is now constantly pressed by people on all sides. He works every minute of the long day and falls directly into a sleep that never seems to be long enough. Still, given the time and place, it’s a good situation. Food is abundant here, he’s living inside, and after awhile he gets to learn cooking. He’s in a better place than a lot of people.This is primarily a love story; a love that crosses classes and is forbidden- preserving estates and titles takes precedence over love. It’s also an adventure story; the kitchen staff marched with the lord of the manor when he went to war supporting King Charles, and they were expected to fight with the soldiers. I liked the characters. They are not likable all the time; they do stupid, human, things sometimes. But, in the end, it’s a story about food. We might think that cooking back in those days was fairly primitive, but it wasn’t. It was actually very sophisticated. One of the culinary trends back then was to create dishes that looked like something else – parts of animals and birds sewn together to create a mythical beast, meat in pastry to look like a bird, sugar creations in the shape of just about anything. Cooks vied to create the most elaborate and surprising dishes- a sort of Iron Chef, Stuarts edition. Most of the year, the diet was rich and varied; the manor supplied fish from its own ponds, poultry, eggs, dairy products, pork, honey, wheat, fruit and vegetables (they did eat their ‘sallets’) and much was stored for winter. A stable trade system meant the upper classes enjoyed sugar and spices. The sheer amount of person power it took to feed a manor was incredible- most workers were specialists, turning the spits in the kitchen, washing the endless stream of dirty dishes, plucking fowl, managing the fish ponds, the dove cote, the hen houses, the spice room, making the salads, cutting up the meat… and all those people had to be fed, too. You can see how a book can be created around a kitchen of the era! The food, and John’s relationship to it and how he uses it to speak to the lady of the manor, is lovingly detailed, much more so, really, than the people.Food was not always plentiful, however. It was easy to starve back then. The stark difference between the incredible plenty of the start of the story versus what they have to deal with when the Roundhead soldiers steal the food from the manor and destroy what they cannot take shows how dramatically life can change. John falls back on how he and his mother lived in the woods, and on what he learned from the book of the Feast. He is the hero of the tale, for all the people living on the manor. What the Feast was is never made clear. It’s like a myth of a Golden Age, when all were equals and food was plentiful. Was it a pagan community that had existed in the woods before Christians arrived? Was it a myth to comfort the reader, a dream to hold onto? Did it have a direct bearing on John’s ancestors? Was the book a semi-magical teaching aid that allowed John to excel in the manor kitchens later? In the end, it doesn’t matter. It allowed John to hold on and to save the manor. ‘John Saturnall’s Feast’ is a story of cycles and renewals, both earthly as the wheel of the year turns and spiritually, as human hope and happiness comes up again and again.
    • 4/5
      It's interesting, because I've come across a controversial subject two days in a row in reading. John Saturnall's Feast, while being a fabulous story (and one that had me drooling), carries the honor of being a historical novel and as such, will get a little more leeway from me.So what is that controversial subject? It's rape, folks. It happens in books, I get it. My issue is when it happens and we're supposed to just forget about it and move on, much like the women characters who experience it in the books. Now, I know in the time period this book is set in, rape happens. It happened then, and I know for sure those women then did not have the resources and information we have today about it's lasting effect. They were just affected, and then they moved on. So this paragraph is all I'll say on the subject. I wish Lawrence Norfolk had given Lucretia a bit more respect and had her maybe, I dunno, wait a little while longer to move forward on any sort of physical relationship, but that's my modern sensibilities kicking in.As for the rest of the book? It was fantastic. Each chapter began with 17th century (I believe?) writing about the preparation of a feast. People, I didn't know half of the ingredients as they were being described, but my mouth was watering. And then there came whatever gelatin concoction John made - it sounded MAGNIFICENT. And it was probably something gross like old ladies marshmallow salad at church pot lucks. But anyway, the description of the food was amazing and I was so caught up in the happenings and the vivid images that I could see everything coming to life.I think this would be a fabulous book club read. There's so much discuss-able material and quite a few historical events are touched on that really centered the story and brought it to life.
    • 4/5
      John Saturnall muss sich als Waisenjunge durschschlagen und gelangt zu einem Gutshof, dessen Herr Sir William ist. John erhält dort aufgrund seiner Kenntnisse und seiner Mutter eine Anstellung in der Küche. Schnell entwickelt sich das Talent des Jungen und er steigt in den Rängen immer höher. Doch die Tochter Williams, Lady Lucretia, hat es dem Koch angetan. Und auch sie hegt Gefühle für ihn. Wäre da nicht ihr Verlobter Piers, der um ihre Hand anhält. Und gerade John soll derjenige sein, der das große Festmahl bereitet. Doch dann bricht der englische Bürgerkrieg aus und es beginnen neue Zeiten. Nur die Geschichten seiner Mutter und die Liebe zu Lucretia lassen den Jungen kämpfen…John lernte die Grundlagen seiner Kenntnisse von seiner Mutter, die jedoch im Dorf als Hexe verschrien war. Sie mussten fliehen, doch die Flucht kostete der Mutter das Leben. Erst im Gutshaus lernt John, was Anerkennung und Freundschaft ist. Und die Liebe zu Lucretia lässt ihn auch das alte Festmahl verstehen, das Männer und Frauen als gleiche Parteien miteinander begangen haben und für jedermann war. Doch Lucretia ist einem anderen versprochen. Erst der Kampf ums Überleben und gegen ihre Läuterer bringt die beiden näher. Johns Kopf scheint erfüllt von Speisen jeglicher Art und Güte, selbst in mageren Zeiten, kann die Küche und der Koch ihre Künste beweisen.Intrigen, Krieg und die Liebe zwischen Ständen. Ein altes Thema in ein neues Gewand getaucht. John erzählt seine Geschichte. Auch wenn die Hauptfiguren wie John selbst oder Lucretia teilweise und wie man es aus ähnlichen Filmen und Literatur kennt, überzogen und unverständlich reagieren, weil sie dem Zwang des Standes und dem Ansehen unterlegen sind, ist die Geschichte schön gesponnen. Sie beginnt mit einem sehr jungen John und endet mit einem Koch in mittleren Jahren. Freundschaften werden gestrickt und gestärkt und die Geschichte zeigt auch den Zusammenhalt unterschiedlicher Schichten in Notsituationen. Falls es einen Film dazu geben sollte, werde ich ihn mir auf alle Fälle anschauen.
    • 5/5
      ‘John Saturnall’s Feast’ is set near the start of the English Civil War. John is the child of a woman who is a sort of outcast; an herbalist and midwife, she lives on the outskirts of the village and doesn’t go to church. Of course this means she is thought of as a witch. When a plague runs through the village, she is blamed and they are run out of town. They take up living in a deserted house in the woods, living on late season fruit and chestnuts. She is dying, of both starvation and disease, but before she dies, she teaches John to read from a book about a strange feast held in Buccla’s Wood. It encompasses every form of food; fish, fowl, vegetables, sweets, mammals are all included, and the feast is for everyone, not just the rich as is the way of the land at the time. At her wish, after her death, he is taken to Buckland Manor where he is put to work in the vast kitchens. John’s life changes totally. Used to being alone or with only a couple of people, he is now constantly pressed by people on all sides. He works every minute of the long day and falls directly into a sleep that never seems to be long enough. Still, given the time and place, it’s a good situation. Food is abundant here, he’s living inside, and after awhile he gets to learn cooking. He’s in a better place than a lot of people.This is primarily a love story; a love that crosses classes and is forbidden- preserving estates and titles takes precedence over love. It’s also an adventure story; the kitchen staff marched with the lord of the manor when he went to war supporting King Charles, and they were expected to fight with the soldiers. I liked the characters. They are not likable all the time; they do stupid, human, things sometimes. But, in the end, it’s a story about food. We might think that cooking back in those days was fairly primitive, but it wasn’t. It was actually very sophisticated. One of the culinary trends back then was to create dishes that looked like something else – parts of animals and birds sewn together to create a mythical beast, meat in pastry to look like a bird, sugar creations in the shape of just about anything. Cooks vied to create the most elaborate and surprising dishes- a sort of Iron Chef, Stuarts edition. Most of the year, the diet was rich and varied; the manor supplied fish from its own ponds, poultry, eggs, dairy products, pork, honey, wheat, fruit and vegetables (they did eat their ‘sallets’) and much was stored for winter. A stable trade system meant the upper classes enjoyed sugar and spices. The sheer amount of person power it took to feed a manor was incredible- most workers were specialists, turning the spits in the kitchen, washing the endless stream of dirty dishes, plucking fowl, managing the fish ponds, the dove cote, the hen houses, the spice room, making the salads, cutting up the meat… and all those people had to be fed, too. You can see how a book can be created around a kitchen of the era! The food, and John’s relationship to it and how he uses it to speak to the lady of the manor, is lovingly detailed, much more so, really, than the people.Food was not always plentiful, however. It was easy to starve back then. The stark difference between the incredible plenty of the start of the story versus what they have to deal with when the Roundhead soldiers steal the food from the manor and destroy what they cannot take shows how dramatically life can change. John falls back on how he and his mother lived in the woods, and on what he learned from the book of the Feast. He is the hero of the tale, for all the people living on the manor. What the Feast was is never made clear. It’s like a myth of a Golden Age, when all were equals and food was plentiful. Was it a pagan community that had existed in the woods before Christians arrived? Was it a myth to comfort the reader, a dream to hold onto? Did it have a direct bearing on John’s ancestors? Was the book a semi-magical teaching aid that allowed John to excel in the manor kitchens later? In the end, it doesn’t matter. It allowed John to hold on and to save the manor. ‘John Saturnall’s Feast’ is a story of cycles and renewals, both earthly as the wheel of the year turns and spiritually, as human hope and happiness comes up again and again.
    • 5/5
      John Sandall grows up with his mother, the village wise woman, during the reign of Charles I in the fictitious Vale of Buckland. With his mother labelled as a witch, they are forced to flee into the woods after several of the villagers, among them children, have died. During the following harsh winter out in the open, John's mother dies, and he is sent to the Manor of Buckland to be taken in by its owner, Sir William Fremantle. Ending up in the big house's kitchen, John is able to demonstrate that he is possessed of an extraordinary sense of smell. Thus begins his ascendancy from kitchen boy to Master Cook himself.This is a strange concoction of a book which defies easy categorisation. So far I had only read Norfolk's Lemprière's Dictionary before (in a German translation) which I struggled to get on with and comprehend, so ambitious was its scope. John Saturnall's Feast, in contrast, still shows the author's ambition when it comes to scope (this is particularly evident when he talks about Bellicca's Feast and how its notion still reverberates down the centuries), yet it is so much more accessible. Each chapter is preceded by a short excerpt of John Saturnall's (fictitious) book and a recipe that often bears a connection to the events happening within the house or the larger world without. As we get to the narration as such, I was amazed to find that Lawrence Norfolk had waved a magic wand and transported me right into the middle of the plot, shivering in the freezing rain as a mute and invisible observer. He describes the hectic ant hill of the manor's enormous kitchen wing and the dishes they produce with the most sensuous language, so that I experienced the red, rough and chapped hands in the scullery, the din of the clattering pots and pans, the symphony of smells assaulting the nostrils and the delicate textures and tastes of the ingenious dishes myself. When John's mother reads to him from the book which describes the ancient Feast of Bellicca, John's hunger in the frosty woods is suppressed, yet I experienced the exact opposite whilst reading this book! The English Civil War makes a brief appearance in the book, but mostly the kitchen staff only experience the tumultuous times third hand through news sheets or the reports of passing drivers, the kitchens and the wider environment of the manor house and its gardens, ponds, orchards and fields constituting a sequestered and self-contained world in itself. This is no page-turner in the usual sense, yet I found it nearly impossible to put the book down, the pages turning as if by themselves, the slow-cooked plot following John from childhood to mature adulthood with a tender love story hidden therein. It contains a manifold of layers and allegories which will probably only emerge after repeated readings. I only have one minor criticism: I wish Lawrence Nofolk had found other adjectives to describe Charles I than just "sad-eyed". If I have counted correctly, it appears at least three times! Surely a writer of his calibre has got a wider vocabulary at his disposal; yet it is not enough to deter from the enjoyment of reading this novel and it still justly deserves its rating of five stars. This is a novel that has to be experienced, not read. Enjoy!(This review was originally written as part of Amazon's Vine programme.)
    • 3/5
      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.
    • 4/5
      Set in the 17th Century just before and during the civil war, this book showed a lot of promise. John Saturnall and his mother, a suspected witch are driven out of their home by puritanical villagers. The only thing that John and his mother have left is a book setting out an ancient feast, that has been lost to the people, and John dreams of creating this feast again! He has a fantastic nose and can smell out the tiniest ingredients in recipes. He gets a job as a kitchen boy in the Manor's kitchen and works his way up to the top. I really love the descriptions of the food preparation, the Kitchens and the equipment used and there are some wonderful recipes written in ancient language. The under laying story however was, for me a little bit disappointing! The portion of the book recounting the fighting during the civil war, I found almost incomprehensible, muddled up and confusing. It's fascination came and went for me, starting so well, but going a bit flat half way through.