Name: As Meat Loves Salt
ISBN: 9780156012263

Maria McCann

In the seventeenth century, the English Revolution is under way. The nation, seething with religious and political discontent, has erupted into violence and terror. Jacob Cullen and his fellow soldiers dream of rebuilding their lives when the fighting is over. But the shattering events of war will overtake them.

A darkly erotic tale of passion and obsession, As Meat Loves Salt is a gripping portrait of England beset by war. It is also a moving portrait of a man on the brink of madness. Hailed as a masterpiece, this is a novel by a most original new voice in fiction.

As Meat Loves Salt

kemi

Love is a madness, but there, it is hardly an original observation.

I loooooooove a delusional problematic narrator. Jacob is both unreliable and painfully honest with us—though not those around him. Despite his flaws, you find yourself rooting for him or at the very least rooting for him to become a better person as he embraces his gay nature. I didn’t go into this thinking there would be a happy ending but BOY OH BOY the ending comes out of NOWHERE. Take from that what you will. I got halfway through last summer, dropped it for some others, but picked it back up again easily. It’s long and verbose and I can foresee myself picking it up to reread in the distant future, but as of right now I’m not keen on it. Once was enough.

Transplant Othello to the tumult of a country in social and political flux and en route to regicide - England in the 1640s - and render him uncertain about his sexuality, and you have the makings of Jacob Cullen, one of the most commanding characters in contemporary writing. As the book opens, Jacob is an educated, vigorous and dauntingly strong manservant in a Royalist household, who has begun to imbibe god-fearing revolutionary pamphlets. He is on the brink of marriage to his virginal sweetheart, but is unsure of his emotional needs, and in possession of a boiling point he reaches all too often. He is also, we learn, fearful of being identified as the murderer of a local boy, and a potential nemesis arrives on the very day of his wedding feast, prompting the first of a series of impetuous, temper-fuelled bad decisions: Jacob flees, dragging his new wife and one of his brothers with him. Thereafter he proceeds to wreak havoc on the lives of others but mostly on his own fortunes - as a servant, a husband, a brother, a soldier, and, critically, as friend, co-conspirator and lover of another man disaffected by the lurch from freedom to tyranny now apparent in Cromwell's New Model Army. To step outside the law, outside the state, outside the established and natural order of things seems to supply the only prospect of happiness ...

a horrifying read, but in a good way. the writing is amazing but dear god the protagonist is evil

As Meat Loves Salt

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