As Meat Loves Salt

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When he is back in the city, he imagines that he sees Ferris on the street and at one point says “…and I told myself he had most likely survived, and was even now turning the corner. I did wonder about the wooden floorboards and the wooden beds though as I found it difficult to imagine it would have been easy to muffle the sounds of male sex which can be quite acrobatic. The lovers are two halves of a coin, light and dark, one as honest and easy to read as the other is secretive and Machiavellian – or are they?

I think it may have been Caro, but were she and Ferris really in the bushes or did Jacob just imagine it because he was over the edge? These choices take him from his relatively comfortable life as a servant in a manor house, to the harsh and brutal conditions of the New Model army. That Jacob is one of the most unpleasant characters ever put on page, and yet one of the most charming at the same time.

No detail is spared: the realities of war are hideously vivid; any scene featuring illness or medical treatment is. Obsession as much as love, at least one of the men with admirable strength of character, the other one ambiguous or dark. I have lost something that he touched, and the destruction of it has gained You nothing, for now I no longer read the words, I hear them, as if he implored me face to face.

The historical setting is the English Civil War of the 17th century, and we absorb some of the radical ideas of the time from the servants' reading of contraband pamphlets that must be carefully concealed from their Royalist masters. Jacob relates “everything he had told me as we lay together the night before: all about our first meeting, how I had at once wounded him, how when I stripped by the fire he could scarce breathe for delight”. McCann’s unflinching descriptions of battle are matched by the power of her depiction of London in a A graver difficulty is that to read As Meat Loves Salt is to spend 532 pages in the company of an unusually baffling psychopath. Both men were married and Ferris was in love with his wife – there was no real concept of gay, but that’s what makes gay historicals so fascinating, for me.Essentially, Jacob burns with religous ferver at a time when religious differences were so important (and had long been! But Jacob Cullen is in thrall to his own wrath - he's a sinner, a criminal, and a violent man, which is plenty, honestly. the historical context and the details of living in that era are meticulous and vividly depicted - but they never overwhelm the narrative. Either way, I suspect the undeniably bad blurbs are one of the reasons AMLS didn’t achieve greater fame.

As I said above, I'll need some time to think about it but there are indeed many questions marks and dots to be joined for me. Then nothing will do but read those scenes again, and before I know it I'm in Winchester, I'm in London, I'm watching what infatuation and and anger and not a little madness can do to a person, and the kind of damage that person can do to those around him. This was McCann's debut novel and she has since published two more, The Wilding and Ace, King, Knave.Thanks Erik – the date thing was to do with the letter, I can’t remember off the top of my head – the book’s upstairs and it’s a long time since I read it – but it was the letter that I remember, that seemed important. At other times the target is missed in terms of tone - when the Diggers' colony becomes troublesome, Jacob looks back to a time "when the colony was but a maggot in my friend's head". Second, the painting originally contained Courbet’s lover, but after the affair ended badly, Courbet just… deleted her.