Fiction/Molly McCloskey: One of the most disturbing images in the Famine Museum in Strokestown is an 1877 photograph taken by Capt William Willoughby Hooper. It is of a small group of famine victims in India in an advanced stage of malnutrition.
What makes the photograph so uniquely shocking, in an age when the power of such images is waning, is its explicit composition: these starving adults and children, skeletal, dead-eyed, have been brought into a studio and posed. Half of them are arranged on what looks like a church pew, the other half either sit or lie on the floor in front. Those too weak to support themselves, the accompanying card tells us, have been propped up. The group is as meticulously and artfully arranged as any turn-of-the-century family sitting for a portrait. There is no pretence here to merely accidental aestheticising. Capt Hooper has created a tableau of horrifying elegance.
Hunger, the début novel by Elise Blackwell, attempts to tell the story of starvation, and near-starvation, from a sufferer's point of view. Though Blackwell has produced an intensely lyrical work, her aim is not to aestheticise suffering but rather to explore the lengths to which we will go in order to avoid "that gray hunger" and the justifications we might offer ourselves for having committed the crime of survival.
Blackwell presents a fictionalised account of events that took place at the Research Institute of Plant Industry in Leningrad during the siege of that city, when more than one million people died, many of starvation. In the autumn of 1941, as German troops surrounded and blockaded Leningrad and food supplies grew scarce, those at the institute took a collective vow to protect the thousands of seed and plant specimens, not only from hungry looters, but from their own hunger.
Blackwell's unnamed narrator, an adulterous sensualist and institute botanist, interweaves the story of that winter with tales of his travels around the world collecting specimens, his amorous adventures, and reflections on the culture and gardens of the Babylonians, for whom he feels a particular affinity.
As those around him - including his wife - die, and the definition of food broadens to include lichen, hair oil, petroleum jelly, pigskin machine belts boiled into jelly, scones made of floor sweepings and root flour, and dogs and cats and their excrement, the narrator employs his own forbidden tactics for survival: "A man is ruled by appetite and remorse, and I swallowed what I could."
Blackwell's very slim novel explores various forms of appetite, juxtaposing images of plenty and pleasure with images of scarcity, always in a pared-down but stylised prose, the effectiveness of which varies. Her descriptions of desperation can be arresting, as the facts, well-chosen, speak for themselves: "People did anything to feed their children. They traded away the valuable and the sentimental. They killed and cooked beloved pets. They peddled their flesh. They peddled the flesh of the children needing to be fed."
But her descriptions of pleasure work less well, possibly because her narrator's aloofness makes him seem a man unlikely to have lived so passionately, or perhaps unsuited to tell the tales. The bloodlessness of his tone left me largely unmoved on the subject of his quickly accumulating losses. Nevertheless, the novel's brevity, minimalism, and intense focus on a single consciousness is a brave approach to a sweeping catastrophe, and Blackwell's choice of a rather unheroic narrator enables her to avoid the trap of sentimentality.
Though this is very much a novel about survival and sacrifice, it is certainly not a feel-good treatise on the human spirit. Blackwell's narrator survives mostly by not sacrificing.
Molly McCloskey is a novelist and short story writer
Hunger. By Elise Blackwell, Heinemann, 130pp. £8.99