*As Meat Loves Salt by Maria McCann (Harcourt/Harvest Original, 2021)

 

I read about this book somewhere recently were it was heralded as a terrific novel about homosexuality, which it is.  It is also a very engaging and ambitiously conceived and executed historical novel, and I read it as quickly and avidly as any book I've read.  The reader (me)  is drawn into the world of Civil War (17th century) England and finds it difficult to break out of the book -- a result, I think, of the fascinating characters, the vividly-evoked time and place, and the sensual and beguiling writing.

Our (anti-) hero is Jacob Cullen, a young man born to a respectable family who lose their social and financial standing due to the father's compounding debt, and are reduced to working as servants -- first exhaustively in the fields, later more comfortably in the manor house -- for a family of rural aristocrats.  Jacob cannot control his violent temper, which causes him, again and again, to destroy his happiness and separate him from those he loves.  Although I was totally engaged with this book and very much enjoyed the experience of reading it (it did seem like an experience), two things about it somewhat perplexed me, and perhaps detracted from my enjoyment and high regard for this book.

The first was Jacob's character, most specifically his hot, uncontrollable temper, which causes him much travail (and obviously propels the somewhat melodramatic plot).  He is as hot-headed at the end of the book as he is in the beginning, which might be  realistic, but is narratively disappointing.

The other thing that made me pause was the, for want of a better expression, "sexual orientation" of the two main characters.  Introduced as heterosexual men who have both passionately married women, they become passionate lovers themselves.  I suppose this is a reflective of the murkier sexual world of the 17th century, when sexual orientation was not a concept, and people did not think of themselves as hetero- or homosexual.  Perhaps  what made me question this was the fact that I was not sure if this was a clever manifestation of the sexual culture at the time, or a failing by the author to create coherently sexual men.