As Meat Loves Salt (5*)

A glancing reference to its gay theme by an unremembered cultural critic sent me to this novel about the English Civil War (who knew? not me!) and immediately launched an anachronistic guessing game about three brothers who first appear to be the main characters:  Is it him?  Or him? It can't be him, he's getting married!  And then, during a marital rape that initiates the galloping plot I had the nagging, distasteful suspicion that I had been duped into reading a bodice-ripper!

Such is the impeccably researched accuracy of Maria McCann's mesmerizing story, however, that modern readers, conditioned by relatively recent concepts of sexual identity, have to rewind their clocks and expectations.   The love story between the hot, passionate Jacob and the coolly calculating Ferris emerges in fits and starts as it might have in 1646 under primitive conditions that also include hand-to-hand combat and barbaric dentistry, vividly rendered.  

McCann offers fascinating tutorials on printing and sough building; she also writes vividly about gay sex as well.  How's this metaphor for going down?

I let him in then, and held tight as a hound who pulls down the stag.

Unfortunately, I think McCann invests Jacob, her violent and compelling narrator, with a little too much emotion.  Call me sexist, but I don't believe many men are capable of the devotion he shows to Ferris whose betrayal seems rather more believable given his ambition and the times.

Let's just say there are no happy endings to be found in this otherwise masterful fairy tale.