THE GLUTTON

A young peasant boy’s ferocious appetite fascinates and repulses his French countrymen during the revolution.

Tarare is born in 1772 to a young unwed woman and, years later, he is dying while shackled to a hospital bed with only a nun for company, as rumors abound that he’s a cannibal. How his life took such a tragic and grotesque turn is the crux of this novel, which breathes life into the mythology surrounding a real historical figure. Tarare is naïve as a child and limited in intelligence as a teenager, but he’s deeply devoted to his mother; then his stepfather almost beats him to death after he makes an inadvertent slip to a friend about the man’s smuggling business. Forced to flee, Tarare falls in with a band of vagrants headed to Paris and develops a voracious appetite, which their savvy leader quickly turns into a street performance, encouraging Tarare to eat corks, animal corpses, and buckets of entrails. After the group dissolves, Tarare joins the military in hopes of being fed, but his appetite lands him in a hospital, where doctors are fascinated by him but also suggest he might be useful to the battle against the Prussians as a spy who can swallow missives. In Blakemore’s second historical novel, following The Manningtree Witches (2021), she vividly and compassionately imagines the misery of being the Glutton of Lyon and deftly questions what terrible appetites develop when people are denied love and a place in the world: “Sometimes he worries that hunger is all he is....It is in this moment, with the delicate cruciform shadow of the church’s weathervane grazing at the toe of his shoe, that Tarare realises he faces down an existence of unrelenting, insatiable want. Of eternal suffering. That a void opened up underneath him when it opened up within him.” In Blakemore’s skilled hands, Tarare becomes complex and fully human rather than an abject horror and historical footnote.

Visceral and haunting.