Review: The Reluctant Cannibals - Ian Flitcroft

The Reluctant Cannibals is set at the fictional St Jerome’s College, Oxford, in 1969. The year is significant; while the rest of the world was watching Neil Armstrong exploring new frontiers on the Apollo mission, the Oxford scientist Nicholas Kurti was expanding the frontiers of gastronomy with his Royal Society lecture The Physicist in the Kitchen. The experiments he demonstrated, including the creation of a ‘reverse Baked Alaska’, formed the basis of molecular cooking and paved the way for the likes of Heston Blumenthal. Ian Flitcroft’s debut novel is concerned with St Jermone’s Shadow Faculty of Gastronomic Science, a group of professors with a similar dedication to culinary experimentation; dedicated followers of the nineteenth century French gastronome Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin, they meet each term to try exotic new dishes from around the world.

The rules of the faculty, drawn up on the back of a napkin during a night of heavy indulgence, require each member of the dining club to bring a guest to each feast, chosen for their expertise in a specific field of culinary knowledge. The guest must bring with them a dish which the club has never tried before. There are risks, however; the quest for novelty, combined with the professors’ access to a lavishly-stocked wine cellar, proves disastrous when a Japanese diplomat attempts to prepare fugu for his hosts. Fugu is reputed to be a relatively bland dish, except in one respect: the fish contains a deadly neuro-toxin, which can cause paralysis and death. The low-level presence of poison in the flesh merely causes a tingling sensation in the lips, but if an unskilled cook accidentally cuts into the liver or ovaries, then a fatal dose can be released into the dish. His judgement clouded by the faculty’s excellent aperitifs, the guest makes just this mistake, and the new Master of the college is faced with a potentially serious diplomatic incident on his hands. The shadow faculty takes the matter slightly less seriously, declaring it a ‘bloody magnificent way to die’.

This incident in the beginning of a cat-and-mouse chase between the shadow faculty and the Vice-Chancellor, who is determined to root out such dangerous frivolity from his university, complicated by the investigations of an aristocratic undergraduate, furious at the existence of a club to which he isn’t invited, and the dying wishes of eccentric Faculty member Arthur Plantagenet, who dedicates his body to gastronomic science – on the condition that it is served at their next meeting.

The Reluctant Cannibals is a slightly whimsical, very English comedy, in which the expected idyllic scenes of Oxford student life (bicycles, cobbled streets, seminars conducted whilst walking by the river) are undercut by Flitcroft’s sense of gothic humour (for example, the presence of a dissolute ghost haunting the College’s wine cellar) and his occasionally Wodehousian turn of phrase. A particular highlight is the college chaplain’s struggle to come to terms with the aesthetic sensibility of the shadow faculty, and their willingness to prioritise matters of taste above concerns about their eternal souls. At Arthur Plantagenet’s unofficial wake, one professor (a keen fan of the music hall double act Flanders and Swann) takes to the piano. Arriving late, the chaplain stands 'in stunned silence looking in on a room full of Oxford dons all singing about cannibalism'.

The mischief-making Plantagenet is a memorable character, who I could easily imagine being portrayed by Richard Griffiths. Having been informed of his terminal illness, he dedicates himself to dying ‘a fragrantly flavoured death suffused with the best ingredients that nature and human ingenuity have gathered over the last two millennia', oblivious to the discomfort this causes his colleagues. After a near-fatal collapse, he is revived by his close friend Augustus Bloom, who later recounts 'Arthur's remarkable recovery and tried to do credit to his description of dying, though he couldn't come close to matching Arthur's extraordinary enthusiasm for this usually unpopular activity'.

In recent years, cookery has taken on a rather macho air, driven by the likes of Gordon Ramsay. Recent literary novels concerned with food have emphasised this, from the squalor and dissolution of Irvine Welsh’s disappointing Bedroom Secrets of the Master-Chefs to DBC Pierre’s Lights Out In Wonderland, in which a disaffected anarchist throws himself into self-conscious culinary excess in a bid to lose himself completely. The Reluctant Cannibals ultimately has a warmer tone. One incident in particular highlights this. Noticing that the chaplain has been cast into spiritual doubt by Plantagenet’s odd bequest, the Faculty decide to play a harmless prank on him whilst he is alone in the Chapel, hiding behind the organ and dispensing benevolent advice: 'That god had taken to replying to his prayers was a great solace to the chaplain, though it would lead most men to doubt their grip on reality.'

The Reluctant Cannibals is filled with trivia and anecdotes about the history of gastronomy, and there are plenty of passages which will raise a smile. Flitcroft goes to some trouble to create a sense of realism, incorporating the history and constitution of the faculty into his novel, and also discussing his own motivations for writing it. Maybe the tone of the novel is best summed up by his meditation on the pleasures of quail eggs: 'No reasonable and otherwise caring person should spend too long thinking about the common human practice of eating the unborn eggs of birds. It is not after all a practice that will bear up to deep moral inquiry when compared to the protection we offer our own children, but anyone with an aesthetic soul can only marvel at the glorious colours on the outside and especially the inside of a quail egg'.