Blasts from the Past: The Last Banquet by Jonathan Grimwood (2013)

This is the latest in a series of occasional posts featuring books I read years ago about which I was wildly enthusiastic at the time, wanting to press a copy into as many hands as I could.

I often feel that publishers fail their authors with book covers. Sometimes I wonder if the designer was given the opportunity to read the text rather than just provided with a brief. I’m sure that’s not the case with Jonathan Grimwood’s The Last Banquet whose jacket suits it beautifully.

We first meet five-year-old Jean-Marie d’Aumout in 1723, enthusiastically eating stag beetles, analysing their taste and describing it to himself. Rescued by the Duc d’Orléans, he’s set upon a path which will see him become Manager of the Menagerie for Louis XV and negotiating with Pasquale Pauli on the eve of the Corsican war for independence before retiring to his chateau to pursue his scientific and culinary curiosity, always attended by Tigris, the blind tiger he’s reared from a cub. For Jean-Marie, the whole world’s a pantry and continues to be so throughout his long life during which he consumes an astonishing variety of things. Having followed the trajectory of the Age of Reason, this vibrantly original novel ends in 1790, the year after the Revolution began.

Not being an SF/fantasy reader, it took me a while to catch on that Jonathan Grimwood was better known to many as Jon Courtenay Grimwood. He also writes thrillers under the name Jack Grimwood but as far as I can see, this one was his only outing as Jonathan.

What about you, any blasts from the past you’d like to share?

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