Five Quarters of the Orange by Joanne Harris.

“When my mother died she left the farm to my brother, Cassis, the fortune in the wine cellar to my sister, Reine-Claude, and to me, the youngest, her album and a two-liter jar containing a single black Périgord truffle, large as a tennis ball, suspended in sunflower oil, that, when uncorked, still releases the rich dank perfume of the forest floor. A fairly unequal distribution of riches, but then Mother was a force of nature, bestowing her favors as she pleased, leaving no insight as to the workings of her peculiar logic.

“And as Cassis always said, I was the favorite.”

The opening lines of Five Quarters of the Orange by Joanne Harris.

Perhaps there is some sort of lesson here for me as a reader: here’s an opening whose style and strategy I generally find very appealing, but which in this case doesn’t work for me—and that response was characteristic of my experience of the entire book.

We’ve got a strong narrative voice that dives right into its tale; we’ve got hints of complicated family relationships and longstanding tensions; we’ve got an indication of another strong character, Mother, in the offing; we’ve got the odd and potentially charming detail of the truffle; and we’ve got the inversion in which an album and a fungus become the appropriate legacy for the favorite child while the less-favored must make do with property and a valuable wine collection.

Really, this is the kind of thing that should be catnip for me.

And yet, it instead had the effect of making me wary, putting me on my guard. It strikes me as being a bit too pat, too facile; it seems to be trying too hard to seduce me. And so it inspires resistance. Perhaps this was the response that the author hoped to inspire; after all, much of the novel is concerned with both resistance (the narrator’s against the authority of her mother) and the Resistance (of occupied France during World War II). But I doubt it.

As I say, my response to the novel as a whole was much the same. It features elements that I found appealing, especially a refreshingly astringent narrator and an unsentimental view of childhood. Yet overall I didn’t find it as engaging as I’d hoped I would. The foreshadowing is laid on rather thick, and the dark whimsicality is clunky rather than creepily charming. The book alternates between two narratives, one historical and the other contemporary, and its need to withhold information about the historical tale for purposes of climactic revelation is handled rather ham-fistedly, with the narrator petulantly complaining that she must tell the story in her own way.

All in all, a book by which I felt more manipulated than engaged.