Last Banquet cartonato_Layout 1DH: Jonathan, thanks so much for considering my questions about The Last Banquet. In writing about France on the eve of revolution, did you feel that you were escaping from the concerns of our own era or revisiting them with a fresh perspective?

JG: When I first thought of writing The Last Banquet I thought of the era as interesting but distant. I would have a man going though the age of Enlightenment into that of revolution; while never quite knowing what was coming, no matter how ominous the portents. As I began to write the novel I realized I felt many of the things that Jean-Marie felt. Not least that a change is coming but we have no real sense of how big, how tumultuous it will be and what kind of society will take the place of the one we inhabit. I suspect all societies believe they will remain. So change must always come, I suspect, as a shock. I find myself looking at the world a little differently.

DH: The most striking feature of The Last Banquet’s foreplay that I remember was that Jean-Marie could learn what his wife had been eating for the past several days by tasting her during sex. Why did you make taste the primarily form of sensuality in Jean-Marie’s life?

JG: There is, it seems to me, a huge cross over between sex and food in the sense that both are about appetite and hunger, taste and smell and texture. So yes Jean Marie can taste food eaten in milk taken from a breast or the last drop of urine. He is the least squeamish of men. I wanted him to bring the same appetite to sex that he brings to food. He is not, certainly not for the time, sexually promiscuous; but he is wildly promiscuous when it comes to food and chasing down a new taste. Obviously enough, the book is actually about one man dedicating his life to the search for the impossible, but taste and food make a useful metaphor.

DH: I wondered in my reading of your book, if I was over-intellectualizing the pleasures of sex. You’re celebrating sex, pleasure, sensuality, the exploration of our world through the five senses and the joy being a foodie. Maybe my attempts to theorize about it during my reading is sort of wimpy. What do you think?

JG: I hope that the reader feels as Jean Marie feels about sex; which is that, like food, sex is a matter of the senses as much as physical need. I’m not sure JM intellectualizes sex, nor does he push its boundaries in the way of his neighbor, the Marquis de Sade. Jean Marie certainly tries to codify his response to food in the manner of his age though; the problem being that his response to food is as much instinctive as intellectual, and his passions as an artist of taste are sometimes at war with his desire to see himself as a scientist. Also, de Sade was, in many ways, a monster. Jean Marie is not. At least he doesn’t believe himself to be so.

DH: The first third of The Last Banquet has the quality of a classic adventure story of the kind that Robert Louis Stevenson might have written. We identify with the impoverished and orphaned Jean-Marie. We want him to succeed at school, make friends, triumph in his adventures and make a good marriage. We may get distracted from the underlying reality of the dissolution of his class. In writing the novel, did you think of Jean-Marie as doomed from the very start? Or did you see him as perhaps he saw himself: as an decent boy operating in a world that he thought he understood?

JG: I knew Jean Marie was doomed from the start while knowing that he didn’t know that and he believed his life would begin and end in the world into which he had been born. He is a decent boy and a decent man and his heart is very much in the right place. But, in the end, he is a creature of the Enlightenment rather than of the Revolution, and his instincts are natural not political, in the sense that he’s a humanist as much as anything else. Only at the very end of the novel as his life is coming to a close does he show himself to be more than this. Although I’d say he shows himself to be Modern, in the sense that we are modern. He inhabits the space between the very end of the absolute, the rise of Enlightenment and the arrival of the Modern.

DH: There’s a large double portrait of the 18th century French scientist, Lavoisier, and his wife by David at The Metropolitan Museum. Lavoisier is sitting at a table with his scientific apparatus, his wife, who illustrated his work, is leaning over him. I like that picture better since I read your novel. The Last Banquet helped me to realize the complexities of the scientific spirit in the 18th century. Lavoisier, who appears in this most stirring portrait of a scientist that I’ve ever seen, was guillotined…it must have been not long after the portrait was painted. The Enlightenment seems like a snake that wants to bite its own tail. What do you think about this contradiction?

JG: Examining something often reveals its flaws. In examining what was the Enlightenment ended what was. All revolutions come from the middle classes, who fall in their turn. That’s glib, and it may be, all Western revolutions, perhaps even, all Western revolutions within a certain historical period, etc… But there is no doubt that the French revolution came about through a combination of the rise of the French bourgeoisie, the Bourbon King’s famous inability to embrace change, and the huge debt the royal treasury racked up supporting the American revolution.

The Enlightenment cut the ground from under the idea of the Divine Right of Kings, and having prepared the way its leaders fell to the radicals, who fell in their turn to the public’s desire for order, and so ushered in Napoleon and the years of the first French empire. Although Jean-Marie doesn’t know this is going to happen by the end he suspects it. What I find impressive is how thoroughly Enlightenment values embedded themselves into the civilizations that followed.

DH: There are two features of The Last Banquet that I am associating with each other. The litany of food preparation involving the consumption of zoo animals and Benjamin Franklin. The rituals of food come off as a gourmand’s delight. Benjamin Franklin is a sort of gourmand of nature which he explores through his innovative experiments. Jean-Marie’s exploration of sex, food and Franklin’s experiments, taken altogether, make the pursuit of scientific truth seem like a pretty weird and complex thing. Is one of the things we get enlightened about our possibly perverse instincts?

JG: Both Franklin and Jean Marie live in a world that is busy both cataloguing and taming itself in the name of science. We make things safe by naming them and there is something primitive as well as modern in the drive to tabulate the whole world. On a personal level, I think Jean Marie’s drive to note everything he eats is at odds with the almost mystic joy he gets from food. Franklin seems to me to be more concerned with the world without while Jean Marie concerned largely with the world within (himself). I don’t doubt that, in part at least, they’re driven by the same demons.

DH: I found my mood shifting as I read The Last Banquet. At first, I was emotionally invested in the second estate, the nobles, because I cared about Jean-Marie and wanted him to succeed within his class. By the end of the book, I was consenting to the mob’s cry for blood. I guess I’m an impressionable reader. But is that how you engineered the book to make me feel, my allegiance shifting in pace with the temper of the times? And why write a historical novel anyway?

JG: I’m delighted, because that is the progression that I went through writing the book but more to the point it’s the progression that Jean Marie goes through within his own lifetime. He begins by wanting what most young men want… Friends, the girl he loves, a job to call his own, and ends up realizing the weight of history is such that not only is it in the process of rendering the world he joined redundant, but also the world to which he now belongs deserves to go. The mob are crying for blood, and the table has to be cleared so the next course can be set, but it’s what comes after the mob that matters.

In the middle of writing the novel I considered transferring Jean Marie’s story to now but decided eighteenth century France was probably the last time someone would have the reach and the money and the power to source everything it was possible to eat without quite knowing what it was or whether anyone had eaten it before. Also, all books as much about the time in which they’re written as the time when they’re set and so I got to have fun with the French revolution and still talk politics.

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Jonathan Grimwood is a British journalist and the author of several award winning works of science fiction and fantasy.He is especially distinguished for his works of alternative history. The Last Banquet is a historical novel that is set in France in the decades leading up to the Revolution. The Last Banquet, the first novel that Europa Editions has ever published in cloth, went on sale in the U.S on October 1st, 2013.