Magical spuds! (Blackberry Wine - Joanne Harris)

Member Name: KingHerrod

Product:	Blackberry Wine - Joanne Harris
Date:	13/06/01 (199 review reads)
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There is a vicious perception that Joanne Harris is a girls author, she writes books aimed at the female audience. Poppy cock is what I say to that. Joanne Harris writes thoughtful novels, in a wonderfully indulgent style (guys appreciate literature too you know), so ignore the perception and give the lady a go.

Semi-rant over, lets begin, you must have heard of Chocolat, even if it was also a film which made somewhat of a pig?s ear of a wonderful book (sigh, how many times do film makers do that?) Yes, Joanne Harris wrote that book and it was a charming read, whilst also being slightly provocative at the same time.

The follow-up has a similar foody/drinky theme and as you will have guessed is called Blackberry Wine. This time, instead of magical chocolate, being the food theme, we have magical fruit wine as the drink theme. However, this is not a novel about wine it is far more than that, let me enlighten you.

Jay Mackintosh, is approaching middle age, he is trapped in a loveless relationship, with the rather fake and media crazy, Kerry. Drunk for most of the day and angry at who knows what, Jay is a blocked writer. This is not a small blockage, this has gone on for 15 years, since he wrote his one smash book, Jackapple Joe. In the meantime, he has been writing trashy Sci-Fi novels, under a pseudonym. Jay's problem is his preoccupation with a time in his adolescence, a time of mystery and magic, of rambling the wild hills of Yorkshire and spending his summers with an eccentric old man, named Joe. Joe, was a gardener, not any old gardener, but one who shunned chemicals and had gone back to pagan gardening techniques; lunar cycles governing his planting, strange herbal mixes providing protection for his plants and a rather strange potato providing the main ingredient for his fruit wine. Does Joe, practice a kind of magic long forgotten, or is this just in Jay's mind?

Jay, escapes to the French village of Lansquen
t (the setting for Chocolat), buying a scruffy old chateau and trying to hide from the rest of the world. When he is joined by Joe, he is unsure whether he is hallucinating, or whether Joe really is practicing astral travel.

Here he is seen by certain village members as a way to break Lansquent onto the tourist map and by others as a foreign influence and a danger to the traditional way of life, still pottering along in Lansquent as the outside world gathers commercial pace. Jay, finds a kind of peace, becomes unblocked and starts to come to terms with his childhood memories, but can it last and can he hide forever?

It is there that we will leave the plot of this wonderful book, except for one point, some of the old characters from Chocolat return, Caro the interfering busy body, Narcisse the market gardener, Josephine, the now liberated café owner, Roux the gypsy and George the builder. This adds some kind of continuity to the book from Chocolat, but to be honest the book did not need this, Harris creates wonderful characters and I am sure she could have populated a new French village. I got the feeling that the continuity in certain characters was to let readers of Chocolat know that things for Josephine had in fact worked out ok. But enough of the moan, the book is really not damaged nor enhanced by the semi-continuity from Chocolat.

The book is written in flashback form, with Jay, remembering his childhood summers with Joe and the trials of growing up and missing the wonderful simplicity of childhood are explored using this method. Blackberry Wine, therefore, slips in and out of two separate but linked stories, in an ambitious style, but nothing is lost in the flow of the book because of this.

In Blackberry Wine, Harris has recaptured that wonderful descriptive writing style, she flourishes with beautiful descriptions of the smell of herbs, the character of wine; "He pours me, releasing the scents of summers forgott
en and places long past". What you say, he pours me! Yes, part of this book is written from the perspective of an old bottle of wine, what it has seen and what it has heard in its long life in a wine cellar. I love a novel that takes a lateral approach to writing both in style and from point of view and in this respect Blackberry Wine scores very well. The extracts written from the point of view of the wine, work well and add a kind of stepped back perspective to the book.

But as with Chocolat, there is social commentary in Blackberry Wine. Firstly, the desire to commercialise everything is attacked, with Le Pinot, a village in the same area of France as Lansquenet having been transformed into a tourist haven, several villagers from Lansquenet, want the same for their village, with all the trimmings that go with it, high land prices and commercial opportunities. What Harris points out, is with the theme village, comes the loss of traditional values and practices and the driving out of locals as they can no longer afford the price of land in the area. Kerry, Jay's erstwhile girlfriend epitomises the commercial age, savouring the chance to make money and gain publicity and taking this ahead of respecting people's wishes.

Second, Blackberry Wine points out, that with mass farming, we have lost the small vineyards that produce such distinctive wines, the small market gardens that produce strange species of vegetable. The diversity has gone from production, to be replaced by the mass production of the most popular foods. Blackberry Wine, may reflect the feelings of many people, with the shift for more natural production and organic food gathering momentum.

The book is also about the childhood memories that we cherish. Do we as adults have a rose tinted slant on our childhood. Were events really as we perceive them now?

Blackberry wine is another charming offering from Joanne Harris, it is not as magical, or enth
ralling as Chocolat, and the storyline noticeably sags during the middle portion, rather than keeping your attention all the way through. But it soon picks up again, to accelerate to a rather surprising ending, well in part anyway. You are left wondering, was their magic in that wine.

Harris has retained that wonderfully indulgent descriptive, yet smooth writing style, that made Chocolat such an easy book to read and as the reader, the beautiful descriptive prose was a pleasure to read.

If you liked Chocolat, you will like this, it is a story about discovery of self after many lost years.

Blackberry Wine is published by Black Swan, is priced at £6.99 (although I purchased it for £3.50, from Amazon) and is 334 pages long.

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