Blackberry Wine

Blackberry Wine / 0-552-99800-1 Harris is a magnificent writer, and Chocolat is one of my favorite books. I was unaware that "Blackberry Wine" was a sequel of sorts to "Chocolat", but a sad and pained sequel it is, as Harris cautions that the magic of Lansquenet-sous-Tannes can be ruined by those who do not respect and value it. "Blackberry Wine" is superbly written and I can honestly say that it is the first novel I've ever read in which the primary narrator is a bottle of wine. This delightful conceit is truly novel, as the wine bottle follows the life and struggles of the young man whose birth year is the same as her own, and they age together as she waits for the right moment for her tale to be done. The young man in question is a perpetually youthful one-shot author who made waves with his one literary wonder before immediately sliding into the obscurity of science fiction novels and college lecturing. When, on a whim, he opens one of the five fruit wines in the cellar, fruit wines laid down by his childhood friend and mentor, the result is a flood of memories and desires for escape and he flees London to a derelict house in the French countryside, desparate to escape to a simpler world. Any French countryside town would have done, but Harris chooses, almost brutally, to revisit the Lansquenet-sous-Tannes of "Chocolat". I imagine that many readers might expect to be pleased to revisit this lovely town, but the reality is pained by the realization that Vianne has left and the magic she had brought seems to have gone with her, at least in part. Reynaud has not returned, and the townsfolk are no longer as hostile to outsiders as they once were, but we soon learn that in many ways they can be just as hostile to insiders, as they gossip and shun the local outcast - a lone widow with a young, wild daughter. Josephine is here still, bright and shining, as is Roux, but they are not together, and both seem terribly lonely in wake of Vianne's absence. And as the scheming Clairmonts and their friends plot and plan to put Lansquenet-sous-Tannes "on the map" as a gaudy tourist trap, and as the farms fail and crops turn less profitable each year, we realize that soon the magic of the small village will be lost - if not in this book, then later - and the efforts of "Blackberry Wine" to stave off the inevitable do not put the mind at ease. The sorrow for what is being lost is overwhelming, and while I think that is, in some ways, the entire point of the novel, it doesn't make it any less painful and poignant. If "Chocolat" gave us magic and dreams and warmth, then "Blackberry Wine" reminds us that it is our responsibility to cultivate that magic, to create it out of our own efforts, and not to simply use and trash and destroy like the tourists who would ruin Lansquenet-sous-Tannes.

Joanne Harris peoples her stories with characters who are more than a little fey, individuals who possess a touch of magic and who live in the realm of myth or fairy tale. In Blackberry Wine, the magical character is Joe Cox, the pivotal character of Jay, an author's, youth in a small English village. Joe had a magical cottage and garden and made wine from the fruits and berries on his squatter's land by a river, and was the main character in Jay's award-winning novel. Joe's sudden disappearance devastated Jay. When he suffers depression and writer's block, he buys, sight unseen, an 18th century chateau. Joe's bottles of wine, which he's been carting around with him for the past 2 decades, also move to the French chateau. As Jay begins drinking them, magic happens, and there's the over-riding question of, Where is Joe now, and could it be that he's that guy who...?To say more would be to say too much.Lovely book.

Joanne Harris has done it again. After indulging myself in Chocolat, I was a little nervous about reading Blackberry Wine. So many times after a smashing debut, the sophomore effort doesn't match up. However, that wasn't the case with this one. Blackberry Wine is utterly intoxicating.Thirty-seven-year-old writer, Jay Macintosh, is stuck in the past. During his childhood, Jay spent three magical summers in rural England with retired miner and eccentric gardener, Joe Cox, a man who would become a source of inspiration for Jay. Joe, with his talismans, good luck charms and rituals, taught Jay many things, mostly about luck, magic, gardening and winemaking, before disappearing without a trace one day and impacting Jay for the rest of his life. And several years later, after the overwhelmingly success of his only novel, Jackapple Joe, Jay has found himself struggling with writer's block. On a whim, Jay purchases a small cottage in a remote village in France where he hopes to recreate those magical summers and let his imagination and creativity flow. But there are all sorts of surprises in store for Jay -- for one, a mysterious woman with a secret past that influences Jay in more ways imaginable.Blackberry Wine is a beautiful, lush piece of work. However, I couldn't fully appreciate it until I'd read the whole story -- it was too hard to decide if I liked it or not when all the pieces were unread. Now having reflected on the complete story (and after ravishing the last few chapters), I realize that Joanne Harris's touch is still magical. Blackberry Wine will seduce you little by little, and it is so worth it by novel's end.

Joanne Harris' latest book, Blackberry Wine, picks up on some of the themes of her earlier book, Chocolat. Magic and its application to modern life... the hurtfulness of prejudice, especially religious prejudice against those who don't follow the locally prescribed formula... and the folly of blindly accepting what is too often mistaken as progress and success... are central to both works. In Blackberry Wine, Jay Mackintosh needs a little magic. An unproductive novelist living in a depressing English lifestyle earmarked by alcohol and an unfulfilling relationship, Jay is haunted by a childhood defined by bullies and detached parents but redeemed by the quirky Joe Cox, who planted vegetables and made magical wine. Now, on a whim, Jay sets out to rediscover Joe's magic in the French village of Lansquenet, a place which is quaint and remote but beginning to go to seed and also needs a little magic. Jay carries with him the last six bottles of Joe's Special wine. The house that Jay purchases sight unseen except for a blurry picture in a brochure, is in disrepair but reminds him of Joe, and in fact seems to be inhabited by Joe's ghost. In the house over the next several months, Jay uncorks the Special wines one by one, releasing their magic and allowing himself and the house to absorb their mysterious qualities. He begins renovations on the place, taking care not to lose its essential charm. He meets and learns about the people in the village and their concerns for saving their economy and their way of life. His writer's block lifts and he can hardly believe he is able to produce page after page of a new novel about the village and its inhabitants. He is most intrigued by his reclusive and alluring neighbor Marise, respected by some as a hard worker who bothers no one, but denigrated by others for being unsociable and irreligious. But the more he learns about her, the less she fits the character he had presumed her to be in the fiction he has been creating. Although his novel is coming along swiftly, he does not know where it is going, nor where he himself is going. The village also is waffling through the same process, unclear about how to define its future. Should it embark on tourism and commercial development schemes or sit back and submit to its inevitable economic decline? Through a blending of magic and hard reality, Jay rediscovers what is important in planning his own future and that of the village of Lansquenet.

Jay Mackintosh is a frustrated writer. Living in London, he is constantly forced to go to literary parties, and to teach creative writing by his tiresome spin doctor girlfriend, Kerry, and all because of a prize winning novel that he wrote years ago. If left to himself, Jay is content to wallow in the past and to write pulp SF under the name of 'Jonathan Winesap' (a pseudonym derived from two species of American apple). But then Jay is inspired by a piece of junk mail... This is Joanne Harris' follow-up novel to the fantastically successful Chocolat, soon to become an obligatory film starring Juliet Binoche. The theme of the pleasure of mastication is continued here, with homemade bottles of fruit wine replacing chocolate festivals. Not that the wine that Joseph Cox makes is all that sweet. But Jay still drinks Joseph's 'Specials', like he writes SF, not for the pleasure of the taste, but for the joy of its associated memories. For each sip takes Jay back twenty five years, to the summers of the mid-70s, reliving his first tumultuous meeting with retired miner Joseph Cox in a small place called Pog Hill. There is the where Jay will undergo his pubescent years, hiding toys, comics, and himself by the canal. There, separated from his divorcing mother and father, Jay and Joe form a bond which is almost stronger than that between father and son. Joseph Cox is an aged man who has travelled the world, but whose blood beats with the heart of a hippie, and who proves to be a magical companion to Jay, with his herbs and rare seeds, each with its own story to tell. Joe and Jay become master and apprentice in the mysterious art of 'layman's alchemy'. But maybe magic is not enough to save them both from their fates... Jay escapes his London life to live in an idyllic French countryside. But as he becomes embroiled in the machinations and mysteries of this new community, has he truly learnt the lessons of the past? Blackberry Wine is a beautiful novel. Like a couple of other works recently, such as 'Emotionally Weird' and 'White Teeth', the 1970s are very much present, allowing Harris and others to show the development or stasis of their characters, maybe reflecting a bit of soul-searching brought on by the millennium. This novel will appeal to anyone who remembers where he or she was when Elvis died, and the hot English summer of '76. There is a danger in going back to the past in that you can misremember things. Certainly, it would have been impossible for Jay to buy a copy of The Eagle in 1975, since it folded in 1969 (one of the memories of my childhood was the revivification of The Eagle in the early 1980s). But never mind the details (Michele Roberts has also criticized Harris' use of the French inheritance laws), it's the magic that's strongest here. It does seem that, in this quite subversive novel, that Joanne Harris has subtly reverted to her SF past. The model of this novel seems to be th