Confessions of a Flesh-EaterDavid Madsen
Dedalus, paperback, 223 pages, £7.99
Published March 1997
ISBN 1 873982 47 X
Review by David Seabrook (1999)
David Madsen’s début novel, Memoirs of a Gnostic Dwarf (1995) is a gross tour of Renaissance Italy in the company of the hunchbacked Peppe, dwarf and confidant to Pop Leo X, and heretic, schemer and swain. Travelling freak shows, secret Gnostic assemblies, the sulphurous air of the Papal Court: all are depicted in the same affecting detail as if by a revenant’s hand, and in the viperish denouement, for all its shock value, is touchingly true to the period. A purple, plot-driven masterpiece, it garnered excellent reviews and left us all hungry for . . . Confessions of a Flesh-Eater.
Martin Amis would give his expensive eye teeth to be able to write this novel, yet it never rises above a cut price version of its predecessor. Madsen relates the exploits of one Orlando Crispe, a chef of world renown who is also a cannibal, a communer, in his view, with dead flesh; his philosophy is expounded via the reports of a prison psychiatrist as Crispe awaits judgement in a Roman cell. Yet Madsen’s mystical preoccupations, transposed to this present day setting, fail to engage and the narrative, though conducted at the cracking pace of the earlier book, is undiluted camp. Moreover, the detailed recipe ideas offered throughout impress me as affectations serve only to invite comparison with John Lanchester’s low grade début, The Debt to Pleasure. The chief joy of the Confessions lies in its set-pieces, which are plentiful and worth the price of the book by themselves: a sex orgy whose afterglow segues into wholesale carnage, the pervery of Crispe’s scenes with his father, whom he subsequently devours, the young Orlando making sweet love to a side of beef.
So the plot is far from lost. We have in David Madsen something rich and altogether strange, a pseudonymous Jesuit priest writing jewelled prose whose inherent subversiveness is unmatched by any secular contemporary. I have every confidence that the forthcoming Revelations of a Fallen Angel, set in seventeenth century England, will trumpet a return to labyrinthine form.