I love Joanne Harris, and Chocolat has long been one of my favorite food books, so it made sense to return to her for this category, fiction for foodies. Five Quarters of the Orange is at its heart a story of mothers and daughters, with Framboise Simon representing both aspects at turns throughout her narrative. Framboise is the young girl bristling against her hard mother in German-occupied France, as well as the weathered old woman who desperately tries to be a different kind of mother for her own daughters. Like her mother, she harbors a secret, but she ultimately has to decide whether she will let it hold her back or if it will define her in its keeping. Though we are her readers, her assumed confidantes, we are as much held at arm's length as the rest of the world is, in terms of knowing the secrets inside of Framboise's guarded heart. The tale Harris weaves is an intricate attempt to know those secrets, all the while understanding the woman and the mother who made her that way.
As a novel in the "fiction for foodies" vein, Five Quarters performs admirably, as anything by Joanne Harris is wont to do. There is an undercurrent of food running throughout the story, from the recipe book Framboise inherits that contains her mother's secrets and her recipes to the little cafe Framboise opens upon her return to Las Laveuses as a different woman. She writes of her mother's book, "My mother marked the events of her life with recipes, dishes of her own invention or interpretations of old favorites. Food was her nostalgia, her celebration, its nurture and preparation the sole outlet for her creativity" (pg 4). There is a sensuality to all her prose about food, a way the dishes seem like a part of the family, and this even extends to Mirabelle (Framboise's mother)'s naming choices. She describes her own name and that of her siblings, the older sister Reine-Claude and the older brother Cassis:
"My mother had a passion for all fruit except oranges, which she refused to allow in the house. She named each one of us, on a seeming whim, after a fruit and a recipe--Cassis, for her thick black-currant cake, Framboise, her raspberry liqueur, and Reinette after the reine-claude greengages that grew against the south wall of the house, thick as grapes, syrupy with wasps in midsummer." (p8)It is never made clear, because we do not receive much insight from Mirabelle herself, what exactly her feelings behind her children's names are, nor what exactly stimulated the seemingly baseless hatred for oranges that Framboise uses so slyly in that summer of her ninth year. The simplest line to draw would be that they were Mirabelle's favorite fruits, and she bestowed their names upon the fruits of her own labor so that they may share her love. But Mirabelle is a cryptic woman, even when we are allowed access to her thoughts, via her recipe book. The naming is simply one of the many intricacies of a mother that is left to the imagination throughout the text, as many facets of motherhood are. Another facet is interestingly played with in the nigh-mythic fish nine-year-old Framboise is obsessed with catching, called Old Mother by pretty much everyone, it seems. While it may mean nothing, there are parallels drawn between Framboise's pursuit of Old Mother and her fight against her own, human mother, both in her youth and long after her mother's passing. These two figures represent a sort of test of mettle for Framboise, something to be overcome (if not understood) in the end. (No spoilers, you'll have to read for yourself to see whether she passes either of those tests!)
