British WWII novels often have an oldfashioned charm with their dashing doomed fighter pilots or sturdily phlegmatic women keeping up the home front. On the surface, The Kitchen Front would appear to be a pleasant addition to the collection, but it fails on multiple fronts.
The novel follows four women in a village who are competing for the right to appear on a BBC cooking broadcasts. (Call me cynical, but it seems like an obvious attempt to capitalize off the current popularity of The Great British Bake-Off). The four women:
- Nell is an orphan kitchen maid, trained by a saintly old cook, who just needs some confidence. She is an extremely capable cook, but goes all a-dither when asked a simple question.
- Lady Gwendoline is the uppity wife of the resident gentry: supercilious, fiercely competitive, one for whom the ends always justify the means. But behind the imposing facade she is a battered wife who hates her brutal husband.
- Audrey is the single mother of 3 boys, whose husband died in the war. She is struggling financially, in part because her evil sister Gwendoline (see above) is squeezing her to repay heavy loans.
- And Zelda is a London chef, Cordon-Bleu-trained, who is discriminated against for being female in the old-boys-club cooking world. She was seduced by a handsome playboy chef, and is now pregnant.
Calling the characters ‘cardboard’ does a disservice to useful cardboard boxes. These characters are more like a thin sheet of tissue paper, each with a random couple of characteristics that change abruptly as the plot demands. It’s great to see a character grow and change over the course of a novel, of course, but here the changes are abrupt, startling, and inexplicable, at least to me. Lady Gwen is reliably mean as a snake, but when her husband throws her out on a pretext, she suddenly finds a deep love for her sister and turns positively saintly. Audrey fluctuates wildly from being overwhelmed to being capable, from panic to phlegmatic, from bitter to welcoming, and sometimes within the space of a paragraph. It takes very very little for Nell to overcome a lifetime of shyness and incoherence: suddenly she is capable of an eloquent, articulate speech on TV. Zelda is, perhaps, the only character who shows some level of consistency and nuanced change within the 400+ pages of the novel.
For all four women, the cooking contest becomes vital to their futures, for largely nonsensical reasons. Zelda, for example, plans to give the baby up for adoption. ”And that’s why I have to win this contest”, she says. Huh? What’s the connection between the adoption plans and the contest?
Their motivations aside, the rules of the contest are rather mysterious: how come the estate cook and kitchen maid are allowed to enter as a pair, while the other contestants are individuals?
The dialogue is simply ludicrous. Every character talks exactly the same way.
[Nell the orphan kitchen maid] It would be a privilege to assist in any way necessary.
[Alexander the fifteen-year-old] It looks like that’s all we have, I’m afraid. .. We’ll get through this together.
[Eleven-year-old Ben] Whatever happens, Mum, you’ll always have us.
[Eight-year-old Christopher] A hot meal would be far better than the usual carrot and sweet pickle sandwiches.
[Lady Gwendoline] We all have to do what we can for the war effort, don’t we?
There is a heavy dose of sentimentality that goes ill with the supposed fortitude and ’keep calm, carry on’ attitude of the women. I would call it schmaltz if that word were not so inappropriate for the period. And the romantic passages made me laugh out loud.
She watched with adoration as he molded, severed and separated the fish […], as he closed his eyes when drawing in a deep breath to savor the warm fragrances, as if an almighty presence had lifted him to a higher domain.
At some points, a word is used incorrectly.
[Lady Gwen’s husband, a snobby, superior boor] laughed pitifully. ‘Oh, come on, darling.’
I’m pretty sure the author means ’pityingly’.
On other pages the phrasing can make the reader wince.
Exhaustion, disillusionment, and that panicky feeling that everything was running out of control had set up home in her heart.
Doris pulled one side of her lip up uncouthly.
Zelda snapped pointedly, her guttural cockney coming out.
A guttural cry came from the pit of her being.
Yes, the author does seem fond of the word ’guttural’, which is also used to describe the sound of bomber engines. She is even fonder of ’snarl’: Zelda snarls, Lady Gwen’s husband snarls regularly, Audrey snarls, the father of Zelda’s baby snarls. This is not the kind of book that will make the reader pause to enjoy a sentence or clever phrase.
Perhaps the only positive thing that can be said about the novel is that it includes what look like authentic wartime recipes. They are not necessarily items you might want to make (sardine pies with pastry made from sardine oil sound pretty intensely fishy), but it is historically fascinating to see how British housewives cooked through the deprivations of wartime. A reader might be better off looking for an authentic WWII recipe book, though.
All in all, thoroughly disappointing. How can Random House publish such rubbish?
Oh thank you for making me laugh! A hilarious review. Your quotes from it are cringeworthy, underlining the points you were making. Agree with your final assessment, how can a good publishing house like Random House publish this tripe??