The plot sickens

>> Luc Lang's Strange Ways is a tale of culinary sadism

by JULIET WATERS

Henry Blaine, narrator of Luc Lang's Strange Ways, is not an appetizing figure. We first meet the 60-year-old head cook for Strangeways prison in Manchester while he's in the process of deflowering a 50-year-old virgin, a reporter with the Anglican Tribune. Riots in Strangeways have closed the prison down and Henry, who lives next door, is trying to make back the salary he's losing by opening his garden to journalists. This is how he meets Louise Baker. An old lech straight out of a Charles Bukowski story, Henry's not much of a candidate for Viagra. Though by the time Louise is finished with him, he may be. Her sexy church-lady demeanour masks a tendency to engage in some bizarrely sadistic sex practices.

Henry's lechery, however, is really just the surface of his deeply unsavoury character. As we get to know him, his character unfolds like a rotten onion. A lover of Shakespeare, especially his juvenile bloodbath, Titus Andronicus, Henry's a mélange of the worst of Will's darkest villains. He's as manipulative and dishonest as Iago, as perverse and murderous as Richard III, and as bloody as Macbeth. Still, there's no one in Shakespeare quite like Henry.

Strange Ways, winner of France's Prix Goncourt, is a sophisticated, Gothic twist on bathroom humour that, despite being set in England, is distinctly French. There is much strangeness in Strange Ways, but much of it comes from the disassociation between setting and character. Henry is supposed to be a native of Liverpool, but there isn't a whiff of working-class Brit in him. He thinks and speaks like a Frenchman. His attitudes toward food, home and sex are randy and Epicurean in ways that feel off. This gives the whole novel the odd feeling of being somehow culturally appropriated. But, if one can get past this, Strange ways is a very quirky, very dark read.

Not since le Petomane, the 19th-century "fartiste," has France produced such a genius of bowel manipulation. Though in Henry's case we're talking evil genius. And unlike le Petomane, who only manipulated his own bowels, Henry works on others. His career as a master torturer begins as retribution for some bullying by the crew on an oil tanker. It flourishes as a form of existential therapy.

The pain of the prisoners reflects the mood Henry happens to be in. Whether it be a foul humour that has him serving a variety of beans for a week, or a day of great despair that has him adding magnesia. "I, the head cook in Strangeways, know that the power I have over the bowels of my little collection of condemned men makes me omnipotent with regard to the air they breathe, the state of their flesh, the disposition of their spirit, and finally, the plumbing, whether it be the tubes that run though the lags' stomachs or the pipes that line the penitentiary buildings... I can cause a riot by suddenly changing the taste of the food I produce, I can clog up the plumbing and transform the prison into a multi-storey cesspit, no one knows just how mighty I am within my realm." Except they do.

It soon becomes apparent that Henry has more to do with the riots than financial exploitation. After the prisoners have dealt with the worst sex offenders, by hanging and castration, they threaten to come after Henry, holding up a banner for the TV cameras: NO FLOWERS FOR BLAIN, THE TORTURER COOK.

The plot sickens. Torture is only the tip of the iceberg lettuce of Henry's crimes against humanity. Will he get the punishment he deserves? I can't say. But as Strange Ways progresses, it becomes clear that the backlog of food in the intestines of Henry's victims is an excellent metaphor for the bowels of justice. "Justice is on the menu," Henry muses "but what you get is their law, which cracks your teeth like the lentils I used to serve the lags."

Strange Ways by Luc Lang, Phoenix House, pb, 183pp, $22.99