Jello Salad
Nicholas Blincoe
Serpent's Tail Mask Noir pbk, 250 pgs, £7.99
Review by Gerald Houghton (1997)
Most things have, at one time or another, been trumpeted as the new rock'n'roll. In Nicholas Blincoe's spot-lit media-happy little world it's cooking that packs the clappy saps in. Macho-cooking, mind. Lad cuisine. Jello Salad is literature for a Loaded generation. That's to say, flip, sexist, drug-fuelled, rave-driven; crowded with the same vicarious half-arsed thrills that Walsh makes acceptable. And before you go taking that as a recommendation wake-up and smell the gasoline - this is an irredeemably rotten book.
Evidence this from page 94: "He mixed a couple of gin and tonics and drank them both before Susan finished dressing. After he'd refreshened the glasses, he took them through to the living room." Not freshened, not refreshen, nor even refreshed, but refreshened. Think about it.
The plot would like to be a comedy thriller about a Christ-like chef called Hogie with a thing for older women, and his diminutive, cue-ballish pal Cheb. They have been taken on to run a new London eaterie by Susan Ball, the fleeing wife ("Shirley Valentine in reverse") of a toughie wide-boy gangster currently in self-imposed exile on the sun coast. Hubby is chasing after wifey. Wifey wonders after their son who is suddenly up-to-it in drugs and, as Cheb knows only too well, fetched up early in this sorry tale as a corpse in the kitchen.
The problem with all of this is that it's neither pleasingly misanthropic nor blackly funny enough, simply spiteful in the most objectionable of ways. Blincoe's plot seems to have stumbled out of the 80s with not a jot of irony to spice up its boil-in-the-bag flavours. Instead it reaches for taboos to break just because they are there, the worst a rape scene involving the teenaged Hogie which we are asked to excuse because she liked it. Likewise the constant barrage of derogatory gay references throughout that the author himself might call flippant, but which we peg for unpleasantly homophobic.
Too much of the rest is not so much plotted as badly threaded in and out of the handful of lacklustre set pieces that obviously convinced Blincoe he had a novel on his hands. Thus we get a supposedly comic shoot-out, a parade of grating stereotypes, and a tedious denouement that seems to drag on for years. We're not remotely interested in these characters let alone likely to emotionally bond with them.
This book would dearly like to mine the same comic seam as Charles Higson, but even Higson's last (and worst) was cooking on gas compared with this. They are calling it "a delirious mix of Tarantino violence and Almodovar camp". We're calling it an over-hyped, badly written piece of crap.