This narrative concerns a former Royal Airforce Officer who, with the assistance of his wife, is planning to establish an English-themed pub in Paris. On the eve of their departure he bumps into a former officer colleague and the latter's girlfriend and offers them a job running the venture. However the man in question is currently suspected of being the perpetrator of a series of strangulations of women. Since the ports are being watched, the entrepreneur rescinds his offer and the man and his girlfriend melt back into the Central London crowd.
The representative of the Metropolitan Police who is directing this search is portrayed largely in a cognate gastronomic scenario of the French-themed kitchen in a domestic London setting. After submitting to a croissant and coffee at home, he blatantly propels his knife and fork through multiple eggs and bacon at his desk, suggesting that his efficiency as an officer of law depends more on his reliance on the cultural traditions of his country than on the arbitrary culinary whims of his wife. Inspector Oxford, as he is called, is not so self-infatuated to think that after a man has accused himself of compromise, there is nothing left to go on with.
Whereas the RAF officer was a true friend to the man, offering him a new start, the Villain, to whom he now applies, is the false friend. The Villain's offer of asylum is but the preliminary to the dock and a life sentence. The Villain, in a third gastronomic setting, is portrayed as a wholesaler of fruit and vegetables during the last days of Covent Garden's dedicated use as such. The Villain reflects in his character the contradictions of the market itself. The space is limited, the refrigeration inadequate, unpropitious conditions not only for a vegetable market but also for the disposal of corpses, the consequence of the Villain's idiosyncratic ideas of associating with women. Whereas the Inspector's wife is a minor polluter, envenoming her marriage with cackhanded renderings of French cuisine, the Villain is an environmental pest compromising the regeneration of the Thames itself with a jettisoned corpse.
The Villain reaches a climactic point in the history of his criminality when, in the back of a lorry, he wrestles both with his stock in trade, potatoes, and an object connected with his subterranean life, the body of his victim. We can speculate that the reason the potatoes are returning to the farm is that chemical fertilisers and pesticides have produced a glut that the market cannot sustain, or that the taste of London consumers is beginning to move through the spectrum of 'meat and two veg' towards alternatives. As the potatoes and then the corpse spill onto the road, both the produce and the market seem compromised. The Villain still has his persona intact. However when quasi-mystical 'potato-dust' is detected on his person he is revealed a something other than the plausible wholesaler he portrays.
The association of criminality with old-fashioned trade practices is an easy one to make, especially at a time when economic irrationalism is treated as a moral crime. Yet it is a fault either of the book or the film that sticks in the craw and I would prefer to decline it, or even, like Inspector Oxford, surreptitiously return it to the soup tureen.
The representative of the Metropolitan Police who is directing this search is portrayed largely in a cognate gastronomic scenario of the French-themed kitchen in a domestic London setting. After submitting to a croissant and coffee at home, he blatantly propels his knife and fork through multiple eggs and bacon at his desk, suggesting that his efficiency as an officer of law depends more on his reliance on the cultural traditions of his country than on the arbitrary culinary whims of his wife. Inspector Oxford, as he is called, is not so self-infatuated to think that after a man has accused himself of compromise, there is nothing left to go on with.
Whereas the RAF officer was a true friend to the man, offering him a new start, the Villain, to whom he now applies, is the false friend. The Villain's offer of asylum is but the preliminary to the dock and a life sentence. The Villain, in a third gastronomic setting, is portrayed as a wholesaler of fruit and vegetables during the last days of Covent Garden's dedicated use as such. The Villain reflects in his character the contradictions of the market itself. The space is limited, the refrigeration inadequate, unpropitious conditions not only for a vegetable market but also for the disposal of corpses, the consequence of the Villain's idiosyncratic ideas of associating with women. Whereas the Inspector's wife is a minor polluter, envenoming her marriage with cackhanded renderings of French cuisine, the Villain is an environmental pest compromising the regeneration of the Thames itself with a jettisoned corpse.
The Villain reaches a climactic point in the history of his criminality when, in the back of a lorry, he wrestles both with his stock in trade, potatoes, and an object connected with his subterranean life, the body of his victim. We can speculate that the reason the potatoes are returning to the farm is that chemical fertilisers and pesticides have produced a glut that the market cannot sustain, or that the taste of London consumers is beginning to move through the spectrum of 'meat and two veg' towards alternatives. As the potatoes and then the corpse spill onto the road, both the produce and the market seem compromised. The Villain still has his persona intact. However when quasi-mystical 'potato-dust' is detected on his person he is revealed a something other than the plausible wholesaler he portrays.
The association of criminality with old-fashioned trade practices is an easy one to make, especially at a time when economic irrationalism is treated as a moral crime. Yet it is a fault either of the book or the film that sticks in the craw and I would prefer to decline it, or even, like Inspector Oxford, surreptitiously return it to the soup tureen.
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