|
Historical Background
Here's some historical information on the background of The Various Flavours of Coffee. At the bottom of the page is a link to download a Times article How accurate is the historical background of The Various Flavours of Coffee? The Aesthetic Movement was an odd, brief flowering of a tendency which has always been present in art. Like Gothic, Minimalism or Fantasy, it’s really a sub-genre, but one which for a short period – from the 1890's to about 1910 - somehow took over the mainstream. Although we associate it with the epigrams of Oscar Wilde and the drawings of Aubrey Beardsley, its roots are in art criticism, and in particular the ‘decadent’ writings of the Oxford don Walter Pater:
Aestheticism Aestheticism may only have reigned for a couple of decades, but somehow its influence never goes away. Young writers in particular seem to go through a kind of artistic adolescence, in which they imagine themselves to be detached, sardonic flaneurs in red velvet smoking jackets. Most grow out of it. But it’s interesting to note that during the same period large groups of young women – and to a lesser extent, young men – were becoming intensely politicised, not just about suffrage but also about education, penal reform, Poor Law – women won the right to be Poor Law Guardians two decades before they won the Vote itself – as well as poverty and prostitution. The contrast between Emily’s view of the world and Robert’s would have been a familiar one to people at the time. Robert’s attitude to sex is also fairly typical of his period. It was the Victorian George Dryden who wrote that,
This was a view that was enshrined in the legal system of the time – which held, for example, that adultery by a man was not grounds for divorce, while adultery by a woman most certainly was. The Victorians were far from being prudes, but they did have a sexist attitude to sex, believing with William Acton that “a modest woman seldom desires any sexual pleasure for herself.” The inevitable consequence of this was a booming sex industry. W O’Daniel wrote: It is said that [prostitutes] form about one-fortieth part of the entire population, in number about fifty-five thousand. Many reasons are given why this class is so large, but there can be no doubt that the chief reason is, the general state of poverty among the lower classes. Meanwhile, physicians were diagnosing respectable married and unmarried women alike with ‘hysteria’, a euphemism for neuroses caused by sexual frustration. As I note in my acknowledgements, my descriptions of a turn-of-the-century treatment are closely based on those described in The Technology of Orgasm by Rachel P. Maines, in some cases using verbatim extracts from her sources. Similarly, some of the coffee advertisements proposed by Randolph Cairns, and the statements he uses to justify them, are contemporary. To take an example, the statement:
originated from Hugo Muensternerg, a Professor of Psychology at Harvard. And those who think I might have exaggerated the tone of coffee advertising might be interested in this post-war gem for the American brand Chock full o' Nuts:
Suffragettes In making Emily a suffragette I needed to shift around one or two dates in the history of the movement by a couple of years, but otherwise the course of the rebellion was much as I have described it. The Liberal government that came to power in the early 1900's was the most radical for a century, introducing reform on pensions, sick pay, national insurance and male suffrage, but it continually broke promises going back more than a decade to give the vote to women – some say, because of pressure from the King. Certainly, the decision to force feed the hunger strikers was prompted by a private note from the monarch to the then Prime Minister. Marches through central London ended up attracting up to a million protestors – men as well as women - and there were eventually around two hundred women on hunger strike. The authorities, overwhelmed, had little choice but to release them on temporary licences – the so-called ‘Cat and Mouse’ Acts. When they were well enough most went straight out to make further protests. One such was Mary Richardson, whose attack on the Rokeby Venus in the National Gallery was described by The Times as an ‘outrage’. If you look carefully at this beautiful nude, you can still see the scars on her back where the damage was repaired. Where is ‘Abyssinia’? “Abyssinia” was a catch-all Victorian label for an area of East Africa that stretched from British-controlled Egypt in the north to the British Protectorate in the south, encompassing modern Ethiopia, Eritrea, Somaliland and northern Kenya. A part of this was known for a while as ‘Gallaland’ – Galla being the name given to the tribes of the interior. Today it is considered a disparaging term. My villagers incorporate some of the characteristics of the Oromo, the Shanqella, and the Guarage peoples – all of them now endangered cultures. As Samuel Pinker accurately surmises, they live in an area where coffee grows wild, and where it probably originated. Many connoisseurs still believe it to be the finest coffee in the world. Coffee for these people is a mystical, quasi-religious drink, a bit like wine is for the Christian church. What about the description of the coffee business? How accurate is that? Comparative tasting or “cupping” probably started during the seventeenth century as a way for merchants on the quayside to assess the quality of lots they were being offered. By the 1880s American coffee men such as Clarence Bickford and the Hills brothers were developing it into a more systematic way of describing the properties of the brew. Individual firms and importers subsequently started to produce their own coffee-tasting manuals, including J. Aron, L.K Smith and Nestle. However, it wasn’t until Ted Lingle produced The Coffee Cupper’s Handbook for the Coffee Development Group in America in the that a truly systematic guide to the tastes and aromas of coffee came into being. The Brazilian 'valorisation' programme which I describe lasted from the early 1900's to the 1930's. The basic idea was that the Brazilian government, acting in concert with the world’s biggest producers and buyers, would manage its stocks so as to inflate the world coffee price. The scheme suffered several setbacks during that time but somehow staggered on, almost the only scheme in history to have succeeded in keeping the price of a global commodity artificially high. It was the customer who paid the price, of course, lining the pockets of the middlemen and the big producers, but some of that extra profit eventually did trickle down to the ordinary peon, coolie, sepoy or farmer – thus encouraging them to put even more marginal land to coffee instead of other crops. When the scheme collapsed it was followed by vast plantation-burnings, some of which were witnessed at first hand by Heinrich Jacob, as described in his book Coffee: the Epic of a Commodity. The Various Flavours of Coffee is different in many ways from your previous books, The Food of Love and The Wedding Officer. Was that deliberate? To some extent. In The Wedding Officer I wrote about a young British officer who chooses pleasure over duty. In The Various Flavours of Coffee I wanted to follow someone on the opposite journey – who starts off in unfettered sensuality and self-indulgence but who gradually comes to see the limitations of that. And, clearly, it’s a darker book in parts than either of the other two. I think it’s still a comedy – just – but it’s a comedy of characters rather than events. I think of it as a coffee-comedy: dark, intense, with just a touch of bitterness… Another difference is the setting. I’ve always wanted to write a story about business – not in order to portray it as something either particularly evil or particularly good, but simply because business is the dramatic backdrop to most of our lives today, and it’s an area which fiction seems to steer away from. There are films and plays set in the world of work, but rarely novels. Yet business brings together so many great themes – conflict and struggle, families, change, ethics. It’s said that historical novels work best when they examine contemporary themes. Were you conscious of doing this in TVFOC? There seems to me to be a debate, or perhaps it’s fairer to say a struggle, that comes to the fore every fifty years or so – the struggle between selfishness and selflessness, between putting the individual first and putting social responsibility first. We’ve been through a period that has been all about the rise of the individual and giving free rein to pleasure: now we’re starting to think more about social issues and the cost of that pleasure. And one place where that debate is becoming crystallised is in what we consume – so-called ethical consumerism. Coffee is both a pleasure, and an industry which exploits over a million people around the world. I’m writing a story, not a lecture, but the story wouldn’t be worth writing if it didn’t have contemporary relevance.
Coffee is the ultimate decadent crop: it has no calorific value, it is almost worthless as a food source to those who grow it, it’s flown halfway around the world before it is consumed, and the process of turning it into the world’s favourite fast food – now an even more instant form of gratification than in Robert Wallis’s day – is controlled by half a dozen giant corporations. Yet – like so many millions of other people around the world – I am addicted to it, and alone amongst my addictions, it seems to do me good rather than harm. Whether it does good for the others in the chain, however, is another matter. That's what makes it a good subject for a story – the ending isn't written in stone. What would you say is the principal theme of the book? That’s a hard question for any author to answer. Books are about people – characters – not themes or messages. Having said that, as you write a story you gradually become aware of certain ideas that are playing themselves out. I was certainly interested in the way that Emily and Robert swap positions during the course of the story – he becomes more aware of his responsibilities, and she becomes aware of her sensuality. But for a variety of reasons, some to do with character and some to do with historical context, he is able to change, whereas she becomes committed to a more extreme course. In part, this is about men and women, and the different way that they react to certain things. There are plenty of male idealists, but they tend to be less passionate than Emily: plenty of female sensualists, but they tend to prefer chocolate to sex. It’s also a comedy about communication. The Guide is an attempt to communicate tastes and flavours across vast distances, but its creators can’t even communicate their emotions and desires across a room. The villagers and the white men don’t speak the same language, let alone the same ideas. Fikre seduces Robert wordlessly, through the coded medium of coffee beans – a message that means whatever he wants it to mean, and into which he pours his own fantasies. The climax of the book is an exchange of two letters, in which the two protagonists are finally honest about what they feel for each other after one of them is dead. Another theme is freedom – everyone in the book wants to be free, but everyone defines that freedom in different ways. For Emily, it’s political; for Robert, the freedom of the artist, along with sexual freedom and freedom from responsibility; for Fikre, it’s escape; for Pinker, it’s simply the freedom of the market. We know that Robert really does love Emily when he is prepared to allow her the freedom to die: the tragedy for him is that she takes it. And everyone is trying, in their different ways, to be free of the past. The only one who appears to succeed is Pinker – but where is Castle Coffee now? What is the role of coffee in the book? Again, just as coffee has a myriad different flavours, so in the story coffee means different things to different people. At the beginning of the book Pinker claims that coffee is an instrument of moral change. For Emily, it’s a chance to show her worth in the world of work. For Robert, it’s initially just an excuse to be close to Emily, and then it’s a sensual experience and a chance to show off. At different times coffee is a crop, a commodity, a passion, a brand, a drug, a pleasure, and a small family business that’s being borne along by great historical tides. I don’t see coffee as a symbol or a cipher: rather, it’s just the medium through which these stories are played out. How does one make a good cup of coffee? In the course of writing this book I estimate I drank over two thousand cups of coffee. When I started I was still – I’m ashamed to say – occasionally drinking the instant stuff. Now I’m a coffee geek. I don’t roast my own beans – which is what you have to do to count as a coffee geek’s coffee geek – but I am serious about what I drink. The thing is, there is no one way of making a perfect cup of coffee. Considering the story of the book, that’s rather pleasing, but it does make life very complicated. There are a couple of things you should definitely avoid – pre-ground coffee, percolators, anything that keeps the coffee warm and therefore evaporating – but getting it right is another matter. Personally, I don’t like a French press, or cafetiere as they’re sometimes known. It’s too easy to steep the grounds for too long, and adding water to coarsely ground coffee gives you a very superficial, thin taste – you get a higher proportion of the acids in the bean and less of the oils, resulting in a watery coffee that feels very bright and zingy on the palate. At the other extreme are the expensive electric ‘bean-to-cup’ espresso makers, which pump steam through the grounds at high pressure and produce a deliciously thick, oily coffee with a hazelnut-brown crema or froth, sweetened by the natural coffee oils. They’re excellent. After experimenting with a couple of temperamental Gaggias I eventually settled on a Magimix Robot Café – at the cheaper end of the market, but you have to decide whether you want to pay for fancy timers, cup-warmers, computer programs and so on, or just the ability to make a nice cup of coffee. However, as someone once said, espresso is a great way of producing a good cup of coffee but a lousy way of producing a great cup of coffee. That same thick, oily richness, ideally suited to getting the most out of cheap, flavoursome beans like robusta, will also destroy some of the subtle, fragrant overtones of single-estate arabicas. For those, you need something really geeky - such as the Aeropress. Created by a lecturer in engineering at Stanford University, this device aims to bring high-tech engineering principles to making a cup of coffee. Although it look like a cafetiere, and costs about the same, the coffee is actually forced through the grounds by air pressure via a sealed vacuum tube, a bit like a giant syringe. A microfilter purifies the coffee, and it’s also remarkably easy to clean. However, there’s no doubt that it’s a little more fiddly than throwing some instant into a mug – or, for that matter, pressing a button on a bean-to-cup machine. As for what you should drink – well, that’s the fun part. Forget the pre-ground section in your local supermarket. In fact, forget all the coffee in your local supermarket. It could have been roasted months ago, and you want the foaming, full-bodied flavour of freshly-roasted beans – the foam partly comes from the fugitive, fleeting trace of CO2 present in newly-roasted coffee. Find yourself a good local roaster, or get a relationship with one over the internet. Then start to explore the world. At the time of writing, my roaster believes Columbian and Guatemalan estate coffees are superb. Java is strong and nutty, Kenyan bright and zesty; there is good coffee to be had from Australia, Hawaii, even Japan. But at some point, you should definitely investigate the garden- and forest-grown coffees of Ethiopia. Harar mocha is, as Robert Wallis discovered, redolent of leather, chocolate, clay and spicy clove; Sidamo tastes of peach and apricot; Yrgacheffe is light and fragrant, with gorgeous notes of honeysuckle blossom and citrus. In between there is such a wealth of different tastes and flavours that you will have no difficulty at all believing that this region – Kaffa – is surely the birthplace of this extraordinary crop. Here's an excerpt from an article published in The Times on Wednesday March 11 1914
|
