SOURCE: Taylor, D. J. “A Light Collation.” Spectator 287, no. 9032 (15 September 2001): 39-40.

In the following mixed review, Taylor examines the role of food in The Devil's Larder.

Whatever else may be said of Jim Crace's novels, he does at least have the merit of never writing the same book twice. Quarantine (1997), the last but one, featured Our Lord in the course of his 40-day sojourn in the wilderness. Being Dead (1999), its successor, starred a couple of corpses briskly decomposing on some out-of-the-way sand-dune. God and Death having been disposed of, along comes The Devil's Larder, which is about the eternally fashionable subject of food.

Long doctoral theses have presumably been written about literary attitudes to eating and drinking. Thackeray's fondness for food/sex imagery, as evidenced in Vanity Fair and Pendennis (where the lovestruck chef Mirobolant prepares a kind of albino feast in honour of Blanche Amory's virginity), would...