Simon Kirrane
"Is this the best book ever written?” gushes one of the review quotes listed in the front of this paperback (The Literary fucking Review, who should know better). And not since The Wasp Factory have I seen a paperback’s early pages weighed down with such a mass of critical commentary. The inversion here though is that in Chocolat it is the reviews and not the novel itself that is filled with the vile machinations of a tortured mind.
Is this the best book ever written? (That’s ‘Best Book’ and ‘Ever Written’).
Pitting a travelling witch against a black-robed Priest is interesting enough, but when handled in such a lacklustre manner they are not suffused with life – instead they lumber like claymations waddling around a set constructed of Kleenex boxes and crepe paper. The tale sees our travelling sorceress and her twinkle toed daughter (replete with invisible rabbit pal) open up a sweet shop and fall foul of the limitations of Lent with a High Noon structure centring on Easter. As the pages gloop by and time races towards the showdown Vianne (that witch) sees the town around her and its petty problems and sees that they are bad.
To cure these ills we get the hero of the piece: chocolate. The sweetmeat is made more glamorous by losing its anglicised ‘e’ and means that the whole thing has to be set among the rural French, who are not vile because they are oversubsidised farmers with a love of feeding cows shit and sneering at the English but, you see… don’t you see? They are repressed; repressed by the Church, by misogyny, by a mistrust of strangers, by the petty hatreds of the provincial. Imagine Straw Dogs meets Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory.
My problems are these: Chocolat simplifies everything it comes into contact with and doesn’t answer the questions it sets… why do these people need the Church so much that they follow failing Priests? Why does the hand-wringing Priest confess away his sins to a dying Father (sorry father)? Why does he cling to his power? Why do women stay in abusive relationships? Why would any of these people feel better after a Wagon Wheel or a Fuse bar – in one scene a man whose dog is ailing feeds it chocolate and resignedly feels a little better. With one hand the author paints God into a coma and with another she has a man weep over a dying dog (you don’t think that’s an anagram thing?). That’s the sort of imbalance we have here.
Chocolat tries to be serious, it tries to answer big questions but it is weighed down by the trivial, chocolate mars the chance of any big ideas this book has simply because chocolate isn’t love. It takes a subtle hand to blend the bitterness of reality with the sweet joys of fantasy and the concoction that Chocolat leaves you with reveals that more than anything else.
As a summer read this could easily elbow past the anorexic likes of Bridget Jones and confidently sneer but under the spotlight of its fans’ entreaties it melts to nothing.
