Book Chop: Anything Considered

Title: Anything Considered
Author: Peter Mayle
Genre: Fiction/Culinary mystery thriller of sorts
Verdict: Delicious.

Readers of this blog will have to go all the way back to April of last year to see the first Chop of Peter Mayle's work, called A Good Year (the basis for the Ridley Scott film of the same name.)

Anything Considered was a lot like AGY as far as the characters were concerned. Much like Mayle himself, the main character, Bennett, worked in advertising in Britain before moving to Provence, France and enjoying the simpler life. Problem is, the simple life doesn't pay the bills and Bennett is running out of money. He doesn't want to leave the small town of Provence, or the people he's come to love there, so he decides to break new ground. He places an ad in the local newspaper: "British man, thirties, fluent in French, anything considered except marriage."

Within a week he gets a hit on his ad: a rich gentleman named Julian Poe wants to hire Bennett to be his body double in Monaco. Poe is a foreigner, like Bennett, and as such he gets taxed 60-70% per year if he lives in France for more than 6 months at a time. In order to cheat the government, Bennett goes to Monaco and pretends to be Poe--drives his car, eats at his restaurants, basically does all he can to generate a paper trail showing that Poe "left France." Bennett gets to live the high life for free, and Poe gets to stay in France without any problems.

Right?

Of course it's not that simple. :-)

Turns out Poe is using Bennett in a much larger scheme surrounding the French truffle market. Truffles, a delicacy in France, only grow randomly; mankind has not been able to farm them with any degree of success because of all the random factors that contribute to their germination. They're in such high demand every year that the price is astronomical--as much as $400 per pound (and this was in 1996, when Mayle wrote the book.)

BUT, Poe found a formula to grow them and it's 90% successful. Naturally there are people who want to get their hands on the formula and would kill him to do so. He has Bennett move the case with the formula, but Bennett botches it and accidentally lets it fall into the wrong hands. Now in order to keep from being killed by Poe's black-belt assistant Shimo, he has to come up with a plan to recover the case.

Aside from Mayle's crisp, enjoyable writing, the characters in this book were what really sold me on it. I loved the way they spoke and acted, each of them eccentric in their own right. It was a real treat the way he got the details of European behavior to show through the pages. It took me back to rural Spain in a way, and it's rare that a book can get away with that so well.

I read this in hardcover, but it's out in paperback now, and it's a quick read. I'd recommend you read it outside on a sunny afternoon.

Caveats: profanity, frequent sexual references. Not overly vulgar or crass, but it's present.