Sarah Gilmartin’s second novel is a book guaranteed to get people talking. It’s so rich in contemporary issues that I half expected to turn to the back and find a reading group guide (luckily, I was disappointed; or not).
The issue is the evergreen: men and women, men and power, men set against their worst selves. The setting is a high-end restaurant (see also Ross Raisin’s excellent novel A Hunger last year) in Dublin, once known with fashionable ambiguity only as T, but subsequently renamed – in honour of its proprietor and head chef’s ego – to Restaurant Daniel Costello.
As the book opens, we discover that Daniel, a hairy-armed, ambitious 58-year-old, is facing ruin. Whether or not his downfall is complete will depend on the outcome of a criminal trial: Daniel has been accused by a former member of staff, Tracy Lynch, of raping her.
That’s a big topic requiring care, and Gilmartin tackles it with aplomb, never forgetting that this is a novel and that characters, like real people, sometimes need to say things we would rather not hear. The first stroke of inspiration is to tell the story in different and sometimes competing voices, like Akutagawa’s In a Bamboo Grove, or (more aptly in this case) Julian Barnes’s Talking it Over.
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So we hear from Daniel; his wife, Julie; and a former waitress at the restaurant, Hannah Blake. Hannah is our outsider’s window to the hot crucible of the restaurant kitchen and front of house, with its specialist lingo (throughway, two-tops) and the tempo-setting barks between cooking and service areas. “Three to dress! Service! Fire the mains!”
“How could you explain the restaurant to a jury? How could you explain it to yourself?”
Hannah, looking back to when she worked there aged 21, also lets us see what the hyper-masculine environment of the restaurant does to its staff. First, “you didn’t apply unless you had a certain figure or face”. In the recruitment process, “two middle-aged men scanned my CV and my body”.
Then, the brutal banter, where “everything was sexualised. Customers, staff, even the food.” But the colour and energy the restaurant brings into Hannah’s life is something she can’t find elsewhere, so she quickly get used to experiences many women will recognise: the customer who kisses her, the moment when her boss puts his hands on her hips as he passes behind her – just to move her out of the way, you understand.
And she is honest about the way the environment creates a self-fulfilling culture. “Sometimes the chefs got handsy. Sometimes we liked it.” But she knows that an invasive culture like this can ultimately be hard to separate yourself from, hard to render for other people. “How could you explain the restaurant to a jury? How could you explain it to yourself?” Explaining it to a jury is the task of our second narrator, Daniel. He is facing trial with the best lawyers money can buy (with a female barrister, of course, for “the optics”), who seek to invent a working-class background to endear him to the jury. His restaurant has closed due to the reputational damage, and even his teenage son, raised in a #MeToo world, accuses him of being a rapist.
Julie, whose story suggests the difference in attitude to such accusations is less gender-based than generational
In response, Daniel says his son doesn’t know that “since time immemorial, women have been attracted to powerful men”. That line is a red flag to the reader, as Daniel tacks between emphasising his non-threatening credentials – a random helpful account of being nice to a young female driver who ran into him – and letting slip his underlying attitudes: one woman has “great legs”, another is “a good-looking woman, in an obvious style”, and so on.
Last in the cycling narratives is Julie, whose story suggests the difference in attitude to such accusations is less gender-based than generational. Daniel’s “accuser has a reputation in the industry for being a slut”, she notes (and we wonder, what sort of industry polices women’s reputations like this?). “The overreaction of these girls today,” she reflects. “Everything a drama.”
Occasionally Service errs on the side of making points instead of telling its story but there is plenty of drama built in, not just in the engaging account of the trial itself, but in smaller set pieces such as a feared critic’s visit to the restaurant. (“Undo the top two buttons of your shirt,” a colleague advises Hannah.)
The conclusion to the story embeds the complexity of Gilmartin’s approach in the reader’s mind. To say more would of course spoil it, but it’s enough to comment – forgive me – that as a novel set in the high-stakes world of high-end dining, this is both chewy and meaty fare, rare and well done.
