Manette

This is an epic story about two men in love. And food. Set in China in 1924, Hong Kong in 1945, London in 1947, France in 1948 and Rome in the early 1950s Food, love and Victorian poetry. And indissoluble friendships. About seeing life as a newsreel and dissecting it in a doctoral thesis. A multi-sensory experience that includes eating leftover rice with warm milk and sugar for breakfast, the music of Ray Ventura, Italian Nuovo Realismo cinema, Baroque gardens, an evening at a gay pub in London's Soho, facing up to AIDS, Cucina Povera in Rome, the songs of Noel Coward, one hour in the Antico Caffe Greco, two hours in a prisoner of-war camp in Hong Kong, a scene from Virgil's Aeneid, and the poetry of Catullus. Who can be both male and female, a steadfast coward, a knight with no quest, a doubting evangelist, a cook who doesn't want to eat and a poet who doesn't write a line? Meet Manette not for answers but for what it means to be all these things and alive.

Review :
‘Manette is a wonderful, fresh, unashamedly sensual and exuberant novel that courageously breaks the mould of one-dimensional creative writing school literature. It is the story of Percy Langrigg and his search for beauty and love, the latter with Lord David Augustus Brythnoth Sopley Earl of Maldon, and leaps between times and places with rich, unfettered prose: “Having washed his hands at the tap with cold water on the very last sliver of bergamot and lemon-scented Fields spermaceti soap Percy (who since the war had insisted on using only the finest of soaps) dried them on the knobbly blue Komtrust towel he’d bought in Bombay on the way home.” The description of school is flawlessly accurate but less baroque and quickly gathers pace: “Now be a good boy and open your mouth,” says a Classics master, intent on oral sex. Later Percy kisses a man in Manette Street, Soho, and becomes certain of the individuality and the uncertainty of his life and life in general. “That kiss in Manette Street. Manette. A man and woman in one. That’s me.” He discovers, like Sir Percival in the search for the Holy Grail, that the grail is not a gilded beaker, but the quest itself, and we learn in a dissertation chapter about his life as a spy, as well as being a ground-breaking cookery writer. However, the questions about sexuality are explored in such a direct way this novel is in no way nostalgic, a Brideshead Revisited clone, or worse, the eternal Edwardian muscular sunshine of the film Chariots of Fire. The nature of sexuality itself is debated and one conclusion by the end of the novel is that post-imperial England can only be defined with any accuracy by the ex-pat. Literary editors will ignore Manette at their peril, as the novel is not intended for the re-tread, imaginary reader of the large publishing house, who if they asked a question in their English Literature classes at school it was “is this in the exam, sir,”. In Manette there are references on every page and the text often breaks into Latin or French or Italian without translation or apology, invoking Thomas Hardy, and hopefully, with its brand new Bridport publisher establishing a New Dorset School. A wise and generous book and a brilliant debut.’ – Paul Pickering, thrice nominated Man Booker Prize novelist, playwright and poet.