The Oyster House Siege
by Jay Rayner
Atlantic Books £10.99, pp330
The Observer's restaurant critic is also an accomplished comic novelist, but in The Oyster House Siege, which is being promoted as his 'break-out' novel, he mixes comedy with drama to intriguing effect. The setting is the kitchen of a posh Jermyn Street restaurant, the eponymous Oyster House, on general election night, 1983. Head chef Bobby and her colleagues are held hostage there, along with all the diners, by two gunmen fleeing from a botched robbery attempt on a nearby jewellery shop. Over the next four days, as police besiege the restaurant, one gunman, Nathan, discovers a knack for cooking while the other, Trevor, displays his skill at terrorising people to chilling effect. Bobby has to work out how to get out of the situation alive.
It's a good set-up for a hostage story, but Rayner is less interested in the mechanics of the siege than in the emotional journey his main characters are taking. Bobby has to find the courage to deal with the increasingly unstable Trevor (a memorably frightening creation). Nathan has to figure a way out of both the current predicament and his life of petty crime and drug-dealing. Then there's the downtrodden policeman charged with the delicate hostage negotiations. He has to find out if there is more to his life than a fanatical interest in cooking.
There's a lot of visceral violence in the novel - a restaurant critic gets half-scalped, one man is blinded with a knife, another gets forked and several people die - but a lot of comedy too. Sometimes, the comedy undercuts the tension. The restaurant owner turning into a gun-toting avenger might be farcical, but detracts from the seriousness of the situation Bobby and the other hostages are in.
Early on, despite one man being badly beaten, another getting that fork in his neck and two gunmen standing over them, the hostages sit around the television in the kitchen cheering as Tory victories are announced. The hostages are, in fact, remarkably relaxed until towards the end, despite the presence in their midst of the clearly psychotic Trevor. But comic moments such as Nathan thinking a tin of anchovies is a bomb work more seamlessly. Then there are the recipes. When Nathan is asked what he wants by the police negotiator, he responds, on a whim, by reading out the ingredients required to make a veal dish, wiener Holstein. As the siege goes on, we are introduced to recipe after recipe that the people in the kitchen make and consume. Funny stuff, but it does undercut the tension.
Rayner does a good job of evoking the period with much talk of early Eighties politics and music. The structure of the novel is interesting, too, as he reveals the backstory to the botched robbery in slow stages.
For reasons best known to themselves, the publishers claim that this novel 'transforms Rayner into 'the new Jake Arnott'. I can't for the life of me see any connection between this novel and Arnott's work. I'm not even sure Rayner really intended this to be a crime thriller as he's clearly more interested in the cooking than the crime.
Although it comes as a surprise when the violence escalates to a shocking level in what in other ways is a relatively light novel, taken on its own terms, The Oyster House Siege is a most entertaining read. And I hope there will be a sequel to relate the further adventures of those who survive what the blurb calls 'the real Hell's Kitchen'.