Ross Raisin excels at charting the path of the misunderstood loner, the person ripped down by circumstance. His fourth novel is no exception and its subtle attention to the roaring hungers that transform or impede show him yet again as a master-writer for the contemporary age, its fragmentation, disappointments and intense desires.
Enter Anita, top sous-chef in a high-end London restaurant, struggling with the kind of passive-aggressive husband only love must have prevented her from ditching years before he had two strokes. Settings are meaty, physical and visceral throughout as she balances the demands of her job in the restaurant kitchen with the increasing burden of managing Patrick, by now fallen into dementia.
But Anita is all about finding balance and Raisin’s particular gift in evoking a female and feminine mind plays at its best when we witness her tenacious self-interrogation as she tries to do the right thing, whether selecting the correct haunch of well-marbled beef from the coldroom or dealing with her husband’s physical frailty.
While Anita in the present dreams of setting up her own restaurant, backed by her positive and steady romantic interest Peter, Raisin tracks her development from a very uncertain childhood, on through a brief teaching career, and finally to her training as a gifted chef.
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As the pressures on her increase, she considers all options, including stockpiling Patrick’s barbiturates in the event of needing to push things to a final conclusion. Because she is largely alone, she does this out of desperation, but also out of a sense of mercy for Patrick as he deteriorates. With patchy NHS care (of which she is mistrustful) and for much of the novel unsupported by her son and daughter (the latter justifies her absence with claims of work demands), and the virtue signalling of outsiders who simply don’t understand, this painful domestic landscape is full of truth.
Throughout, Patrick’s resistance to his wife is conspicuous, with in-law collusion, a mother-in-law who is the devil’s own creation, and guilt manufacturing of an infuriating level threaten to undermine Anita. Ultimately, she triumphs, and the author’s control of the difference between drama and tension, with the temperate use of the latter as a literary device, makes of this a moving, unusual and beautiful novel.
