Who among us could resist the spell cast by the gingerbread house that appears in the window of Vianne's shop, ''with the detail piped on in silver and gold icing, roof tiles of Florentines studded with crystallizedįruits, strange vines of icing and chocolate growing up the walls, marzipan birds singing in chocolate trees''?Īs in traditional fairy tales, the villains in ''Chocolat'' behave very badly indeed, with not much room for redemption. Though we all know that witches live in gingerbread houses, And sure enough, even the names of her candies seduce us: Eastern Journey, white rum truffle, Nipples of Venus. ''There is a kind of sorcery in all cooking,'' Vianne observes. Her a worthy successor to that doyenne of 17th-century fairy tale writers, Marie-Catherine d'Aulnoy, who also filled her stories with delectable accounts of feasts, festivals and magic. Harris's knowledge of the culinary arts seems to be grounded in experience: the dust jacket tells us that she is part French and part English and ''was born in a sweetshop.'' Her descriptions of exquisitely presented food make The Beautiful and Osiris and Quetzalcoatl all interwoven with stories of flying chocolates and flying carpets and the Triple Goddess and Aladdin's crystal cave of wonders and the cave from which Jesus rose after three days, amen, Well might he worry about a woman whose mother filled her head with ''tales of Mithras and Balder That coincides with Easter, Reynaud is convinced that she plans to undermine both his authority and the teachings of the church. By the time Vianne announces plans for a chocolate festival Vianne's diabolical foil is the book's other narrator, the parish priest, Francis Reynaud, whose name suggests the foxy villains of La Fontaine and who is obsessed with getting rid of her. Her amiable stranger stands on the side of earthly angels. On this theme, illuminating the awful things that can happen when we neglect the satisfactions of this world for the promise of a better one. But in ''Chocolat,'' Harris plays a variation The story echoes those folk tales in which the Devil, disguised as an amiable stranger, seduces the upstanding citizens of a village by awakening their appetite for pleasure. When Vianne transforms a defunct bakery into a chocolate shop called La Celeste Praline,
Novel, which opens with the arrival of Vianne and her young daughter in the small French town of Lansquenet-sous-Tannes at the beginning of Lent. Hocolate, I am told, is not a moral issue.'' Such, at least, is the opinion of Vianne Rocher, one of the two narrators of Joanne Harris's accomplished
This novel pits a heroic chocolatier against a villainous parish priest.
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