Why inappropriate food can make edifice of fiction crumble - Ian McMillan

Suddenly the restaurant doesn’t seem romantic anymore; suddenly the waiter’s imagined wheels are playing the Benny Hill theme tune and the diners are all wearing metaphorical party hats and the sausages are still fizzling and spitting coloured fire and yes, what we’ve come across here is the introduction of the inappropriate item of food to the literary situation, something that makes me as a writer and a reader realise how delicate the ecology of culinary expectation is in a piece of fiction.

Whenever I’m reading a book I soon become aware of any wrong food notes in the writing, something that seems to jar or sit in the wrong place, and when I notice it then the whole edifice of the piece of fiction begins to crumble. It could be something anachronistic, like a platoon of First World War soldiers having a supermarket own-brand ready meal, or it could be something that simply doesn’t feel right, like someone getting a scone in their all-day breakfast. This tells me that the world the writer is creating is somehow inauthentic and then I soon stop believing in that world.

Food and the consumption of it can tell us so much about a character, and getting the tone right is important. For example, here’s someone in the first few paragraphs of a short story making their sandwiches to take to work; they always have the same fillings on particular days of the week: Monday is cheese, Tuesday is ham, Wednesday is ham and cheese and so on. This tells us that the character is careful: careful with money, careful with life.

Perhaps, later in the story, our character might meet someone who is a little more adventurous in their culinary choices. They will sit side-by-side on a park bench and our character will notice that the woman he is sitting next to has got a salad in a bowl. He might spot that she’s eating grapes rather than the biscuit he always brings. Now we can see the two characters as very separate people with different ways of thinking about the world.

And that’s why maybe the fizzing sausages at the start of this piece weren’t really appropriate. Mind you, they got your attention, and that has to be a good thing. Fizzing sausage, anyone? Benny Hill theme tune?

By Ian McMillan