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"I know. I know. You want me to get to the point. But this is at least as
important as the rest, the method of telling, and the time taken to tell… It has
taken me fifty-five years to begin."
Joanne Harris writes in her acknowledgments that she gives "heartfelt thanks to those
who have taken part in the series of armed encounters that became this book." It is
understandable that Harris might have had trouble getting this darker work past her
publishers, who must have been hungry for a sensual and ultimately redemptive tale like
her best-selling novel and fodder for a sappy film remake, CHOCOLAT. The elements of rich
detail that made for such a treat in CHOCOLAT are here as well but they make for a much
more darkly rendered image, replete with shadings of death and suffering.
Framboise Dartigen, the narrator, is the plain youngest daughter of a widow in occupied
France, who returns as an adult under an alias and the cloak of age to resurrect the
burned out remains of her family's home and reputation. The suspense of finding out the
real truth of the demise of this curiously unsympathetic family can be alternately
engaging and irritating. Whereas CHOCOLAT was centered on a sort of white witch, a
thoroughly engaging woman with the gift of entrancing closed-minded townsfolk with her
delicious wares and disarming smile, this is more of a crone's tale.
As a child, the narrator (she is too prickly to have such a sweet name --- Framboise being
French for raspberry) is infatuated with a Nazi soldier, whose actions are driven more by
his desire for selfish gain than the ideas of the Third Reich. Her brother, sister, and
mother are drawn in by his charm and relative power and, as a result, are later tainted
with the label of collaborators. Fiction that abstains from moral judgment can sometimes
be unsatisfying; without the dramatic tension between good and evil, flawed and selfish
characters have little charm, and the harm they come to is without interest. However,
Harris's fiction is much too subtle to rely on easy formulaic characterizations.
Framboise's frequently ill mother, a gifted cook who wills her diary and recipes to the
daughter, is a tortured soul whose love for her children is soured by her fear and anger.
As her children run wild to escape her shouts and slaps, she succumbs to two dangerous
palliatives, drugs and a forbidden relationship, to soothe her tremendous migraines that
verge on bouts of madness. The legacy of both her mother's secrets and resilience are the
curing elements in Boise's character.
Many recipes and telling descriptions of food and people are bound into Harris's tale.
Food provides a means of aptly describing physical characteristics ("her eyes were
almost gold, the color of boiling syrup as it begins to turn"). A simple description
such as "dessert was…a few of my mother's biscuits --- broken, of course; she
sold the good ones, keeping only the mistakes for home" resounds with meaning. The
orange in the title is the fruit whose smell brings on her mother's attacks and whose skin
Boise uses to conveniently bring on those painful periods that allow her some freedom from
home.
The curiosity and incongruity of the five quarters in the title should give you an idea of
all of the effort that went into writing this book. It is not a merry lark but a carefully
plotted and executed exercise that relies on previously successful methods. Harris uses
several narrative threads to pull along her reader: the narrator's obsessive fishing for
an elusive and ancient pike that she believes has cursed her family and the mother's
journal, written in a type of family pig Latin, provide clues to family secrets. The South
of France and its culinary specialties are lovingly and expertly described to captivate
the reader. As much as many elements of the book echo CHOCOLAT, FIVE QUARTERS OF THE
ORANGE is another kettle of fish altogether.
--- Reviewed by Patricia Howard
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