Customer Reviews

As Meat Loves Salt

5 star:		(34)
4 star:		(9)
3 star:		(7)
2 star:		(7)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

A book has affected me fairly deeply if I'm still thinking about it 24 hours later. Well, it's almost a week since I've finished As Meat Loves Salt, and yet I am still reeling from Maria McCann's knock-out novel. I've sat at work not getting work done, and laid in bed unable to sleep, thinking about the motivations and selfish actions of ostensibly unlikable characters. That she was able to actually have me feel any sympathy at all for a sexually violent, brutish and dominating character such as Jacob Cullen is testament to a brillant writer. It would be a crime if this woman never put pen to paper again.
Everything about this story hit my buttons. The raw passion between Jacob and Ferris - at times beautiful, at times whincingly disturbing - left me breathless. It ranks right up there with the intensity of literature's famous love-hate relationship, that between Wuthering Heights' Heathcliff and Cathy.
There were times when I could almost smell the putridness of the battlefield, the fragrance of splendidly cooked game in Ferris' Cheapside home and the filth of the sweaty, unwashed colonists as they vainly toiled away for their New Jerusalem. Also a delight was McCann's attention to the everyday detail of the characters lives. It is a book that certainly reads as if the author has done her homework and is a truly rich evocation of a superstitious, socially repressive and violent England.
I cannot recommend this book highly enough. Hurry up and read it!

Non-fiction military history is what I looked for; instead I came upon this most compelling tale of brutal love and betrayal set during the English Civil War. Manservant Jacob Cullens, the "lumpkin" who settles arguments with his fists--and Christopher Ferris, the idealist who weaves webs with words--make the perfect dysfunctional pair. Just as it is inevitable that their friendship will become more than platonic, so it is that a great harm will come about to both as they seek to control one another totally. That relationship mirrors the tumult of a society where royalists and parliamentarians are engaged in an internecine struggle for supremacy.

That the author did her homework on the period in history is obvious. It is helpful to keep one of those electronic dictionaries handy to look up unfamiliar (to Americans) words like "lief", "syllabub", "hustling".

Count me in as a fan of the unlikeable Jacob Cullens and an admirer of the first-time author, Maria McCann. She has written a masterpiece.

Excuse me as I go for second helpings of As Meat Loves Salt.

When I first finished this novel, I felt a terrible need to get it out of my sight. I couldn't return it to the library since it was about two in the morning, so I hid it under a pile of clothes in my closet. Such was the impact this story had on me - I could barely stand to keep it in my house.

Sound terrible? Well, it was, but in the best kind of way. I suffered through everything with Jacob Cullen, Maria McCann's fascinating narrator. Jacob is somewhat schizophrenic and completely obsessed with violence, but like most people he has his own (flawed) reasons for what he does. He doesn't hate himself, so in seeing everything from his perspective it becomes difficult to hate him for his actions. One also becomes aware of every possibility he has to improve himself and his life. Christopher Ferris, Jacob's lover, is the kind of person and man or woman could (and does) fall for, passionately. This makes it all the more horrifying to be trapped in Jacob's mind as he watches everything good in his life come to ruin. The ending, as gut-wrenching as it is, seems inevitable given that it's brought on by Jacob and Ferris both being true to who they are. There's no escape.

So much could have gone wrong in the craft of this book. Not only is there the difficulty of narrating from Jacob's point of view (the mystery that is Jacob is dribbled out in the smallest hints, dreams or passing thoughts, never given out too quickly), but also the story stretches from a manor house to London to the common fields, and it's all covered in compelling detail. The language, too, never falters in successfully blending 17th-century and modern. The underlying motif of hellfire/desire could come across as overused, but in the circumstances it's the right metaphor.

When I first finished this novel, it was a year ago. I never thought I could go through reading it again. But a few days ago I picked it up and found myself just as compelled as the first time. This book has it all - full characters, mystery, eroticism, tragedy, detailed history and a sweeping insight into human existence. I couldn't recommend it more highly.

This is a strangely compelling novel which, although over 500 pages long, never runs out of steam. Set during the English Civil War, in the first part there is no shortage of incident as we follow the narrator, the handsome and strapping Jacob, on a dangerous path that leads him to the New Model Army. After he's seen murderous military action at Winchester and Basing House, he deserts with a companion to London and what follows is a finely observed tale of dangerous love set against the quotidian life of London in the 17th century. In the final section of this excellent novel the lovers are tested to the limit at the 'Diggers' or 'True Leveller's' colony they and a motley crew of idealists, misfits and rogues are trying to establish. The book ends with Jacob on the quayside in Southampton, bound for New England. The author writes boldly and, for this reader at least, successfully, in a style that combines 'period' dialogue and expressions with more modern turns of phrase. In less skilful hands this can be disastrous, but in Maria McCann's it works very well. This could well be the debut of a novelist with a very promising future.

An incredibly impressive first novel, 'As Meat Loves Salt' bodily transports the reader into another, and nastier, time. Full of gritty physical details, this is no historical romance but a deeply disturbing tale of different types of obsession. The author neatly manages to gain the reader's empathy for a character whose actions verge on psychotic. Recommended.

I felt a considerable amount of research must have gone into that finely balanced characterisation; you love him and you hate him. I have never read another book where I have been so undecided about my feelings for the character, or so dissappointed that someone so sensitive was capable of such things. For me, Jacob was fundamentally human above all else, and contained all the contradictions we find within ourselves. In Jacob, these contradictions are magnified, uncontrollable and tormenting.

I'd love to know how the author researched his character - I cant believe it wasnt well thought through, there is so much there that is fine-tuned.

The book had one major failing for me though which was that it left the outcome of too many events and too much of Jacob's past history unsaid. As a reader I was never satisfied by the story. I got the impression that the author didnt know where to go with her ideas or that she couldnt be bothered to explore them.

Perhaps she thought that if the book was incredible at all, the real problem was that there was too much material and it would have opened too many other themes, for it to be included.
Nevertheless this book is highly recommended - I took it on holiday with me and couldnt put it down.

This is definitely the most engrossing love story I have ever read, vivid, tortuous and exceedingly moving. The story develops against a background of emerging modern rationality and commitment to personal and political freedom, yet it is still tainted by pre-modern religious feelings and irrational drives, as well as by the (rather postmodern) complex personalities of its protagonists. The result is three-dimensional, as obscure, rich and meaningful as a Dostoievsky. One of my best novels ever. A masterpiece.

It's set in the English Civil War and narrated by Jacob, an immensely strong, short-tempered but oddly pitiable psychopath whose version of events is unreliable to say the least. In Cromwell's New Model Army, hiding from the law, Jacob meets a flawed but charismatic idealist, Ferris, who dreams of a new order of justice and equality. Despite or maybe because they're opposite and incompatible they fall passionately in love. But passion doesn't stop them constantly striving for mastery, Ferris via his skill with words, Jacob via his fists. They're doomed, basically.... Anyone who likes historical novels (the meaty kind not the pretty kind) would love this. So, I think, would most slash fans.

After reading a review of this book in a newspaper, I was prepared to be reading a good book but nothing prepared me for how this book would engross me. Not normally one to read a book from cover to cover very rapidly, I finished this book over a few short days, reading it whenever and wherever I got the opportunity. I found myself thinking about the characters after I finished reading the book and how they had really got under my skin so that I almost felt like I knew them. Any book which can seem this real is obviously a superb book and one which I can only recommend in the highest terms. Like a previous reviewer, I think I will need to re-read the book as I'm sure it will reveal more on a second reading when you have a chance to stop and dwell on things without concentrating on the impetuts of the story.

First you walk into another world. And you can't believe how different it is, this place of rigid class distinctions, violent civil wars, filth (by far the easiest bit of Jacob to sympathise with is his liking for that rare commodity, soap). Only the more you read the more you see it's the same world too. True, in our world Jacob and Ferris wouldn't be in fear of death by burning for being in love. But they'd still be fighting for dominance every step of the way, and still trying to come to terms with the fact that to love at all you have to give up part of what you are. Agonising, in the nicest possible way, and wonderfully evocative of a time that comes to life on the page. Historical novels don't come any better than this, but it isn't just a historical novel.