As Meat Loves Salt

Rating:
Summary: A Wonderful, Enthralling First Novel
Review: Maria McCann's debut novel "As Meat Loves Salt" leaves a reader moved and winded. it's a piercingly affecting and compulsively readable novel. I can only laugh at the reviewers complaining about Jacob Cullen's "unsuitability" as a narrator/protatgonist. this dislikable antihero is a standard figure in literature! Richard III, Dostoyevsky's Underground Man, the narrator of Invisible Man (Ellison's), not to mention current figures like Anne Rice's Lestat. Jacob overwhelms the nvoel, which doesnt quite have enough potency on its own to transcend being a powerful character piece. But what a powerful character! Utterly convincingly, McCann creates Jacob's voice; her characterization of him is extraordinarily seductive, compelling, and lifelike. you may hate him at times but you always understand him, and, i think, even love him. the 17th century ambience of the novel is expertly conveyed, and the story resists predictability at every turn. the other great achievment of the novel is its palpable depiction of delicious and tormenting love and sex. the novel builds to a stunning climax, with a denouement that leaves you denuded. I salute Ms McCann and thank her for writing a book that means a great deal to me personally.

Rating:
Summary: Brutal, lyrical, and too realistic.
Review: I spotted the title and thought somebody expanded upon the Jewish Cinderella story. Eh, nope, not at all. What was I getting myself into? Upon finishing the book I had to wonder if the author's deliberate choice of having this anti-hero narrate to us so that we won't be completely repelled by him. If the story was told by Ferris or Caro or with them as the main focus in a 3rd narration setting, I highly doubt we would find any sympathy for Cullen. But because we experience 17th century England through his perspectives and keen observation what choice do we have but to ride the undercurrents with him?

The story begins on a isolated country estate where the effects of the civil war has not been fully realized. Through circumstances of his own doing and those beyond his control, Cullen flees the estate and is eventually absorbed into Cromwell's New Army. Here Cullen (and the readers) are introduced to Christopher Ferris before spinning head first into the brutality of war. As Cullen's world expand, so does his self awareness of his own shortcomings such as lack of self control and inability to keep his temper in check. As hard as he tries Cullen cannot tame his destructive nature and is constantly shocked (shocked!) by the consequences of his own action. Cullen and Ferris would eventually leave the New Army and stay temporairly with Ferris' conveniently wealthy aunt. Ferris is an idealist with dual projects of creating a farming commune of equality and teaching Jacob temperance, self-control, and just how to get along with people in general. The relationship between Cullen and Ferris is that of continuous struggle for dominance; sexually, philosophically, and spiritually.

The sheer lack of romanticism - of history, of the living conditions, of war, and the varied relationships between family, friends, and lovers - is what made this book resonate to me and even had me convinced that this was what life was like some 400 years ago. And perhaps it was too realistic when the book ended. Like most here I was sorely miffed that we do not know the fate of the characters, though one can guess that it would be less than ideal. I've read how some readers found Cullen "lovable", I find nothing redeemable in Cullen but will admit that he is a survivor and will always survive despite his enormous capability for self destruction.

Rating:
Summary: Sumptuous....but devastating
Review: The review on the cover of this book has it right: it's a fat, juicy masterpiece. It's been awhile since I've read a novel that has enraptured me to the extent this one has. I just finished it a few hours ago and I'm still upset by the ending. Not in the sense that I thought it was bad, but rather that it disturbed me in a way that few novels have. This is definitely one that will stay with you after you've finished it. If you like rich, complex characters, tension, interpersonal conflict and a touch of melodrama, read this novel. The relatioship between Ferris and Jacob is both delicious and tortured. However, don't expect to walk away from this book with a warm, fuzzy feeling. The view the book takes on human nature is a very dark one and the last 80 pages or so are gut-wrenching. Love does not conquer all. If anything, it is the source of all suffering.

Rating:
Summary: Entertaining, Engrossing Read!
Review: My favorite gay novel so far this year is written by a woman and a straight one, I assume, at that. According to information on the back cover, this is Maria McCann's deput novel. I'll be curious to see what shw writes about in her next novel. Set in seventeenth-century England, this novel tells the love story of Jacob, the narrator, and Christopher. Ms. McCann apparently has done her homework as the historical details ring true. Or if they're not true, she's good at convincing the reader they are, which is almost as good. This reads like old-fashioned novels so rarely written any more. There is an interesting plot and good character development. Once you get started reading, you're crave this story like meat needs salt and will quickly kill an afternoon reading.

While I cared desperately for both these characters and hoped against hope that their love would last, I found Christopher too much the dreamer. He should have known that he and the others he convinced to go into the commune could never survive.

AS MEAT LOVES SALT would make a fine movie if done well.

Rating:
Summary: A complex, but lackluster read
Review: I can admire this book for the intricate plotting and technically superior attention to detail, but I just found it too heavy going for my taste. Set in the 17th century, during the English civil war, As Meat Loves Salt follows the misadventures of Jacob, born a gentleman but raised a servant, whose overdeveloped sense of personal dignity leads him from one crisis to another. When the book opens, he is already a murderer. Within a hundred pages he becomes a rapist and a thief. All this is perfect training for a military career, and Jacob soon finds himself in Cromwell's New Model army and in thrall to a charismatic man named Ferris. The battle scenes were beautifully described as were the many realistic domestic scenes such as tooth pulling, but I just felt that the novel gets bogged down in its own self-importance.

I think this book is suited to those readers who have a real appreciation for 17th century literature, and readers who have an interest in English cultural history. In fact, I skimmed the last half of the novel, as I was getting impatient with the characters, and wanted to find out quickly what happened to Jacob. As an historical treatise on gay relationships, and a story of the cruel times, I think the novel worked quite well, but I would be hard pressed to recommend this as a "must read."

Michael.

Rating:
Summary: Obsessive love
Review: I love this book - or I won't bother to write a review. Jacob Cullen is a 17th century manservant in England who, under dire circumstances, joined the civil war where he met Christopher Ferris, a gentle dreamer with whom Jacob eventually fell in love with. The story is told from Jacob's point of view - you can't help but be appalled by Jacob's uncontrollable temper and wish he would do things differently. But you know you can feel his love for 'Ferris' as he eagerly awaits each moment they spend together, as he stares while Ferris falls asleep so he can remember the image for the rest of his life. This book may be based on the 17th century, in a generation we can't imagine ourselves relating to, but McCann's writing is enchanting and delectable. The sex is graphic, which I found satisfying, but not out of place. But be patient when you start reading it because the build-up is worth it - after 283 pages! You will love every page and every moment of reading it. You will, like me and many others, pray for a sequel.

Rating:
Summary: An obsessible read
Review: The last time I read a book nearly this good was "Memoirs of a Geisha". That was one of those books that made you relook at your life and think about it for days. "As meat loves salt" brought tears that I couldn't cry, pain that I couldn't quite express. It is THE BEST BOOK EVER! This is what fiction is for! This is why literate people appreciate life better!

Rating:
Summary: A welcome assault . . .
Review: Wow! I just finished reading this book and am still reeling from it. I do not remember the last time I read a novel that made me feel so much so deeply. Moments from the story keep replaying in my mind, as if I had lived them . . .

It is sad to read reviewers casually dismissing this book's narrator as unlikable. Jacob Cullen is twisted, but I find him darkly alluring. During the novel, he alternately reveals his intelligence, his resourcefulness, his idealism, his selfishness, his willingness to please, his paranoia, his shame, his sexual magnetism, and his capacity for cruelty. Still, he does not easily reduce to any of these. If he has one distinguishing characteristic, it is his brooding, passionate nature. Someone flippantly asked why anyone would want to read a novel about such an unpleasant man. The answer is that this sullen protagonist leads a richly textured emotional life, which McCann communicates with alarming power and precision. This book challenges the reader to feel the sprawling beauty and ugliness of Jacob and his world. As such, McCann's talent is a welcome tonic to our current era's numb complacency and tidy compartmentalization of affect.

This novel unsettles because life is unsettling. Love, desire, vulnerability and obsession fold in and out of each other, with violence limning the contours. McCann's novel somehow manages to capture this great big mess in all of its sadness and glory. Reading this novel made me feel my own life anew. I can think of no better praise.

Rating:
Summary: this is not homophobia
Review: I find some of these reviews unfair - the novel most emphatically does *not* locate Jacob Cullen's numerous character flaws within his homosexuality. If the novel equates homosexuality with aggression, how do you explain the existence of Ferris and Nathan, gentle and idealistic gay men? The commune is wiped out not because Jacob is gay but because the local landowner finds it a political threat. This is exactly what happened to Gerrard Winstanley's real-life Digger commune. As for trivialising the end of the English Revolution, the novel does not *address* the end of the English Revolution! It closes in 1646; Charles I was not executed until 1649 and the social experiment that was the Commonwealth did not come to an end until 1660. Sex with boys and prostitution existed before and after the Civil War so it seems reasonable to suppose that they also happened during that time, and that a man like Jacob might fantasise about them. Sodomy was a capital offence, so we wouldn't expect to find people flaunting their activities. That doesn't mean that nothing was going on. But in any case, this is a novel - it's fiction. Must everything in a novel be certified 100% historically authentic, even a sexual fantasy?

Rating:
Summary: The Degradation of Egalitarianism
Review: Most reviews I have read here have almost totally missed the point of this amazing, thoroughly well-written, sophisticated, but for me ultimately unsatisfying first novel.

It is a story of "love" between two 20-something working-class men, set in the tumultuous period of the first modern discovery by English-speaking folk of the notion of genuine human equality: the English Revolution of the mid-1640s. Jacob Cullen (the narrator) and Christopher Ferris meet in the New Model ("roundhead," or popular revolutionary) Army and fall in love. Fueled by Ferris's passion for equality which he has gained from inside his gentle, caring, dedicated, 'new model' self and from the wealth of radical pamphlets which littered London and sparked egalitarian hopes at the time--and by Ferris's widowed aunt's convenient wealth--after what seem endless misadventures they set out to found a Commonwealth, that is, an egalitarian farming community where all will be equal.

Women equal to men? No masters or lords or orders-giving? Everything shared? What does it mean, and how will it work? What about the open enmity of rich aristocrats, and the emotional and social difficulties of getting along in such strange circumstances? Does everyone have to understand love and sharing?

Cullen (rhymes with sullen) joins Ferris's New Jerusalem not for principle but for sex. He is quite perceptive about human nature, learns trades-skills quickly, and has many farming and peasant skills plus enormous physical strength to contribute to the cause, but his twisted psychology is remote, greedy, utterly selfish, and psychotically concerned with (as Ferris finally realizes) his lack of "mastery" in a solely individual way. Cullen cannot stand to take orders, but he does not mind giving them. He wants. He excludes. He kvetches endlessly. He despises most people. And when he is angry, he brutalizes. As he finally comes to admit to himself, he is incapable of human loving.

Cullen is the embodiment of Modern Man, that person envisioned by Adam Smith as being at the heart of capitalism, but with warts exposed by the democratic experience of Commonwealth experimentation: isolated, brutal, self-centered, driven to get what he wants however he might do it, amoral, motivated by Satan (as Cullen views himself). In terms of communal democratic equality, he is its antithesis, antisocial, disconnected, contemptuous, thinking only of himself, willing to take anything he needs to get ahead.

However, the origin of Cullen's hyperindividualistic psychology is not in bourgeois or mercantile habits and desires, as Smith's vision would have it. Author Maria McCann homophobically locates his brutality in his gayness. Possibly Cullen was sodomized, but something in his repressed childhood made him antisocial, and in the novel this seems bottomed in and entirely caught up in his sexual preferences. He muses, at novel's end, whether he will purchase a blond boy to satisfy his needs, and boys seem to have been greedily lusted after by him previously. Not only is this psychology ahistorical and politically incorrect, it is the source of the book's surprising lack of success, its failure despite McCann's great gifts for characterization, dialogue, and historicity of detail. This is a trivial way to investigate, from the standpoint of common people, what happened to the egalitarianism of the English Revolution.