A woman craving freedom kills and eats her other half in Natalie Young's compulsive tale
Lizzie, a fiftysomething housewife living in leafy Surrey, is overcome by desperation and kills her husband Jacob with a spade, chops him into 16 bits, bags and freezes him, then over the course of the narrative cooks and eats parts of his body. After 30 years of unhappy marriage, Lizzie hopes that Jacob's death will be her "chance of a new life".
The most famous cannibal in fiction, Hannibal Lecter, prepared gourmet meals from his victims' bodies, as does Lizzie. The narrative is sprinkled with notes to herself, which mix recipes for seasoning body parts with pep talks and self-analysis ("You are in mad, desperate flight from yourself"). Parts of it are hard to stomach, as Lizzie relates her task in nauseating detail, such as crushing her husband's bones in a blender.
But look beyond the gory details and you'll find a subtle emotional and psychological exploration of an all-consuming marriage and Lizzie's yearning for independence. The author powerfully captures what it feels like to feel "completely alone": Lizzie may live in Surrey but her emotional landscape is like "wandering in the Antarctic of human experience". Jacob had told her that "there were some things missing in her..." and she details the absences also in their marriage. Jacob was a failed sculptor, and the pair failed, too, to sculpt the perfect marriage. Lizzie yearns to retrieve the parts of herself that have been devoured by marriage. "The new life would be structured around avoiding emotional experience at all costs," she insists, and yet suppressed emotion seeps out.
As Lizzie gorges herself yet is never quite fulfilled, this macabre and grotesque novel engrossingly depicts not only bodily appetite but the deepest emotional hunger pangs of being human.
This is a compulsively readable tale exploring the darkest desires of humanity and the discontent simmering beneath seemingly serene surfaces.
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