A.K. Blakemore doesn’t want to write your traditional historical fiction. But it isn’t her fault the genre has become a playground for writers of erotica, stringing lonely souls along with titles such as Tempting A Reformed Rake and Stranded with the Reclusive Earl. Though, you never know, maybe these readers could be tempted by The Glutton, Blakemore’s latest novel which is about Tarare, a man who can eat everything and anything. A real-life figure, everything we know about Tarare has to be taken with a pinch of salt, so what better grounds for a fictionalised account of his life?

We caught up with A.K. Blakemore in her local pub, The Nags Head in Walthamstow, to discuss Revolutionary-era France, the conservatism of historical fiction, and how she writes such unique prose.

Barry Pierce: Where did you first come across Tarare?
A.K. Blakemore: I think he appeared in a Buzzfeed article about the creepiest Wikipedia pages. I thought he was so compelling from a psychological viewpoint, but also within the French revolutionary setting. Food is always political, but during the French Revolution it was so abjectly and basically political. Famine, fortune, all those things were coming into play and it seemed like such a compelling idea for a novel.

BP: And how long was the, like, gestation period between learning about Tarare and The Glutton?
AKB: This was my first idea for a novel, before The Manningtree Witches. But it was percolating for a very long time. And also, I don’t think I’d have been able to sell this one as the first novel. [Laughs]

BP: You can have fun with the second one.
AKB: Well, I had a lot of fun with Manningtree but The Glutton is much more the kind of thing I want to be doing. It feels like more of a risk.

“Food is always political, but during the French Revolution it was so abjectly and basically political.”

BP: Do you like writing risky books?
AKB: Oh totally. I think particularly within historical fiction, I enjoy playing with the genre and its conventions. So, with The Glutton I was trying to play with that, along with ideas of the picaresque. So, Rabelais was an influence, and the weird, twisted morality tales of the Marquis de Sade. Justine for example, which is about this innocent holy fool.

BP: Historical fiction really is a genre that I don’t go near very much. I feel every time I’ve ventured into it, it’s Hilary Mantel at one end and softcore bodice rippers at the other. I’m also too Irish to care about the lives of British kings.
AKB: I feel it’s quite small-C conservative. In terms of the generic conventions and those sorts of things that feel very self-perpetuating. There’s this impression that the sort of historical fiction that people want to read involves courtly glamour, people riding horses, romance. Of course, the lives of most people, historically, look nothing like that. There are people not doing that, of course. Someone like Ben Myers has done some really interesting things. But he’s very much cast as an outlier within historical fiction.

BP: I feel historical fiction never really focuses on the filthy reality of life in the past. People smelled disgusting, they were actively rotting, everything was muddy and disgusting. What I like so much about The Glutton is how repulsive you often make Tarare, like how people often comment on his septic breath.
AKB: The idea of the grotesque fascinates me. The idea of the repellent, I think, is often more compelling to us than beauty. One of the most exciting things about writing the character of Tarare was working out how to produce that visceral reaction to him in the reader whilst also generating empathy for him. And I think a key and, perhaps, not so predictable influence on the book in that way was Cormac McCarthy.

BP: Oh, OK, I can see that.
AKP: While I was writing The Glutton I was reading Blood Meridian, and after I’d finished writing it I read Child of God. I think he does something that’s very perfect where he presents a nihilism, a disgust and a grotesquery, but the writing is so beautiful that I just don’t vibe with readings of him as a nihilist. Because the whole idea is the world is dark and so full of contraindications, but it’s so fucking gorgeous that it’s worth living in anyway. And that’s something I wanted to do in the book. It’s an exercise in empathy with a character who’s quite depraved.

“…what was more interesting to me, more than the medical side of things, was the idea that no matter how much you eat, you’ll always be hungry. It’s one of the most nightmarish things I can think of.”

BP: There isn’t that much primary information out there about Tarare, so how did the research process for the novel look?
AKB: So, the account of Tarare’s medical history by Dr. Pierre-François Percy is really all we have in terms of an actual source. But it’s so bizarre and clearly fantastical that I felt that gave me permission to go in and fill in the blanks with equal fabulism. There also isn’t a lot of writing on the French Revolutionary period that doesn’t solely focus on Paris, so finding what the life of a rural peasant was like led me to going down the picaresque route and reading about French folkloric belief.

BP: I know you weren’t ever interested in writing a facts-based tale, but do you have any theories, from all your research, about who or what Tarare really was?
AKB: I think he was, ostensibly, a showman with a very high tolerance for nausea and a very strong gag reflex. His legend was, probably intentionally, inflated beyond the reality of what he could do in real life. Lots of doctors and people with much more medical knowledge than me have speculated that maybe he had some sort of parasite, he could have had worms, maybe a pituitary gland condition. But what was more interesting to me, more than the medical side of things, was the idea that no matter how much you eat, you’ll always be hungry. It’s one of the most nightmarish things I can think of.

“I think he was, ostensibly, a showman with a very high tolerance for nausea and a very strong gag reflex.”

BP: I want to talk about your prose – it’s so unique in the current landscape. It sits closer to the prose of Dickens than it does anything from any of your peers.
AKB: I think it’s partly coming from poetry. And, it’s weird, a lot of the negative feedback I see out there about my prose is from people saying that they didn’t understand it, or they had to look things up. Coming from poetry, it’s less about fancy words and how to combine them, if you’re a writer of poetry or a reader of poetry, there’s this idea of negative capability where you don’t need to understand everything for it to move you, for it to be powerful. You’re not delivering plot and exposition in these perfectly explicable dollops, you’re playing with convection and language and artifice. I don’t think I’m that weird of a prose writer, I just don’t think many prose writers really pay that much attention to prose, so when someone actually has, it seems disproportionally strange.

BP: You’ve written two novels now that take place in the past, I want to know: why do you feel so comfortable in the past? Would you ever write a novel set in the present day?
AKB: I wouldn’t say no. And I don’t like describing myself as a historical novelist, it just happens those have been the stories I have been drawn to. There’s a lot of things that, as a reader, I don’t want to read about. I don’t want to read about social media. And I would find it completely uncompelling to write about. I don’t want to write text exchanges. But also, I don’t want to write anything that could be interpreted as biographical or autobiographical or autofictional in any way. But that’s a psychological self-protection sort of thing.

BP: Is it possible that modern life just isn’t very exciting and isn’t worthy of chronicling?
AKB: Essentially. To go all Mark E. Smith about it. Yeah.

The Glutton will be released by Granta on September 21st.