[In the following review, Gilbert offers a positive assessment of The Devil's Larder.]

Although The Devil's Larder is a novel about food, I wouldn't read it anywhere near the kitchen: some of the most striking of these interlinked stories include the description of a master chef cooking old leather in order to prove that man will eat anything; the tale of a fisherman dying a horrible death from food poisoning; the thoughts of a supermarket cash register and a recollection of an evening of “strip fondue” that results in much scorched flesh. As you might expect from one of Britain's most experimental mainstream novelists, this writing docs not hurry after the saccharine comforts of Joanne Harris's “foodie” fiction. While just as interested as Harris in describing the tastes and textures of eating, Crace is also intrigued by the by-products and even demonic uses of food. It can make for some very uncomfortable, if fascinating, reading.

A far better place to read the book would be on the toilet: its devilish, episodic chapters lend themselves to brief spurts of reading. Most chapters are not more than a few pages long and demand careful consideration. It is not advisable to read the book from cover to cover in one sitting. The stories are much more convincing when read at intervals. Even a two-page story, which invites the reader to ask their dinner guests to speculate whether they would drink urine or brine if marooned on a raft without water, demands a few minutes of reflection after it has been read. Other stories such as a son's recollection of how his mother would bake her children “blind pie” for their birthdays—a pie that hides gifts such as jewellery—intrigue with their plausible structures.

Crace constructs modern riddles, fables, fantasies, jokes, tragedies and comedies out of food. As with his other work—and as is implicit in the title—paradoxes abound; food provides pleasure but causes pain—there are two food poisoning stories and a couple of allergy anecdotes. Items such as pies and apples appear to be without emotional content, yet evoke the strongest, unspoken feelings. Tasting food is a unique experience and yet food is nearly always eaten within strained social contexts; the collection ends with a description of how a daughter tries to share the taste of pasta with her mother.

Crace established his reputation with his last two books, Being Dead, which won the US National Book Critics Circle award earlier this year, and Quarantine, named Whitbread Novel of the Year and nominated for the Booker in 1997. Being Dead cleverly evoked the lives of a murdered couple by describing their decaying corpses, while Quarantine took an oblique look at the life of Jesus Christ. Both novels were sombre tales characterised by masterfully precise prose. The prose remains as lucid as ever here, but the humour and earthiness that permeate The Devil's Larder make the novel seem more human and less ethereal than its garlanded predecessors.

A doctor who discovers polyps growing in an old man's bowels narrates the best story. He retrieves the polyps after a rectal examination, but his patient dies soon afterwards. When the doctor discovers that the polyps are vegetable matter, he decides to grow them in his surgery. The tubers flourish and the doctor decides to make a soup out of them, which he offers to his interfering sister-in-law. Not only is it a hilarious and disturbing story, but it also provides a perfect metaphor for this collection: these stories are polyps grown in the dark, fetid passageways of Crace's imagination.