Cooking With Bones - Jess Richards

At school, you meet somebody you fancy, and the temptation is to try to make yourself into a copy of them – suddenly you might develop an interest in indie music, vegetarianism, morris dancing or whatever. The impulse comes from a fear that we might not be interesting enough in our own right to attract the attention of our inamorata, so the safest option is to become what they are interested in already. In other relationships though, where the power structure is tilted in our favour, we try to mould people in our own images, particularly children and siblings. This is the type of relationship Jess Richards explores in her second novel, Cooking With Bones.

The novel centres on a pair of sisters, Amber and Maya. Maya is a formwanderer – a synthetic human, genetically engineered to possess a heightened sense of empathy. People’s desires are literally projected onto her, as her features change to reflect their emotions. This makes Maya an ideal companion for Amber, who always wanted a twin, but formwanderers are not always benevolent. They are capable of interpreting human emotions, but lack the social conditioning which prevents our ids from running wild and enacting our darker impulses, and they are linked to a series of murders. The sisters’ relationship is complex; Amber wants most of all for Maya to develop her own character, but at the same time she seeks to shield her sister from hurtful or violent emotions. She does this by ensuring that her own personality is the predominant influence on Maya. When they are threatened with separation, which would put Maya in unsupervised contact with others, Amber decides the only course of action is for them to run away, eventually coming to rest in the village of Seachant.

Ms Richards is a skilled creator of worlds. Her debut novel, Snake Ropes, described an isolated matriarchal community, in which women dominated trade and justice as well as raising families. Playing with syntax and dialect, she created a rich language for her characters, giving the book a fairytale feel which became increasingly sinister as the narrative progressed. Here, she alternates between two settings. The first is the futuristic dystopia of Paradon (evocative of Paradise, London, Pandora’s Box and paragon), where the weather is artificial, emotions are monitored by the state, and soap is sold under-the-counter, plastered with health and safety ‘slip’ warnings; later, the narrative moves on to Seachant, an isolated rural community which harks back to a folk-memory of wise women and herbal magic. Like Margaret Atwood, Richards is able to locate believable characters within a fantastical world; Seachant feels like one of Shakespeare’s blasted heaths, with the elements reflecting the emotional turmoil of the protagonists. 

We are introduced to Seachant through the character of Kip, a young boy torn between a mother who dresses him in girls’ clothes and a father who wants him to show more masculine qualities. As the pressure of conflicting expectations builds, he retreats into a world of fantasy. A fall temporarily deafens him, isolating him still further from the community, but with the outside world shut off, he is able to find his own agency, coming to understand some of the mysteries of the adult world which surrounds him. Amber also comes of age in Seachant. She and her sister come to live in a deserted cottage, formerly inhabited by a ‘crone’ called Old Kelp, whose cookery books give Amber a release for her desires, which can be kneaded into the recipes in the form of herbs and spices. As in Barbara Pym’s Excellent Women, Amber finds a form of expression through her cooking, an act of creation which helps her develop into womanhood, guided by secret knowledge passed down a matrilineal line. The one character who remains dependent on others is Maya; her own ambiguous identity becomes key to a murder mystery plot strand which develops in the second half of the novel.

Cooking with Bones showcases Richards’s ability to write with powerful imagination and invent distinctive voices for her characters. She moves between settings and narrative voices seamlessly, creating a world which is at once magical and unsettling. Her fiction is concerned with people who exist on the margins of society; women such as Old Kelp whose knowledge makes them figures of suspicion in superstitious communities, and adolescents who enjoy neither the protected status of children nor the self-assurance of adulthood. It is no coincidence that the real-life inspirations for both of her novels are located on the boundaries of the UK – the island of St Hilda in Snake Ropes, and Polperro in Cornwall here. In Richards’s fiction, these are places where the influence of the city is limited (there are no police or doctors for miles), and people still live at the mercy of the elements. Ultimately, her characters’ chances of survival are determined by their ability to assert their own personalities in the face of the conflicting expectations of the people who surround them. This is a vivid and intoxicating novel, which takes commonplace ideas and twists them into fantasy, and is full of future promise.

Visit Ms Richards' website and blog here