As Meat Loves Salt by Maria McCann
A book review
In As Meat Loves Salt, Maria McCann brings seventeenth-century England vividly to life in the person of Jacob Cullen, a man whose flaws are deep, but less unforgiveable or intractable than those of the world he was born into. As it opens, Jacob is among the servants dragging a pond for the body of a promiscuous serving maid he despised. From there, the novel gets grubbier. England is at war; Cromwell's army is battling to dismantle the nation’s hierarchy. Our hero lands in the midst of the fray.
In a chill rain, the peasant soldiers struggle to learn the drills. "At last we got on to Advance Your Pike, which was done in three motions. I was cack-handed here, and the movement would not come smooth. The pike, which was to be locked between my right shoulder and arm, slipped away and I had to catch it in the left hand before it brained one of my fellow scholars…. As I took the thing on my shoulder the top of my shoe came away from the sole. The pike dropped backwards and the others cried out to me to mind what I did."
The actual warfare is no tidier, with Cromwell's soldiers battering down walls with cannon and rampaging through manor houses with pikes and swords. And yet among these scenes of fear, horror and desperation, Jacob begins to learn what friendship is, and love, as he bonds with an only partially disillusioned fellow soldier. (2001, 565 pages)