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This combination of material asceticism and passionate enthusiasm for the sensuality of the everyday is at the core of the tradition from which Mrs Gray springs, with its obvious affinities to the style of Bloomsbury, where it was a moral imperative that the beautiful should always take precedence over the comfortable. Though ‘beautiful' is not quite the right word – it is a kind of authenticity which is invoked here, as though water is more authentic, more real, wetter, drawn from an open-air cistern than from a city tap.

The metaphysics of authenticity are a dangerous area. When Mrs Gray opines, ‘Poverty rather than wealth gives the good things of life their true significance', it is tempting to suggest it is other people's poverty, always a source of the picturesque, that does that. Even if Mrs Gray and her companion live in exactly the same circumstances as their neighbours in the Greek islands or Southern Italy, and have just as little ready money, their relation to their circumstances is the result of the greatest of all luxuries, aesthetic choice. ‘Poverty', here, is sloppy language – a rare example of it. Mrs Gray isn't talking about a pavement dweller in Calcutta, or a member of the long-term unemployed in an advanced, industrialised country; not about poverty as such, but about a way of life which has a dignity imposed upon it by its stoicism in the face of a nature on which it is entirely dependent. The Japanese created an entire aesthetic, and a moral philosophy, out of this stoicism and this intimate relation with natural forces; as soon as they had a bob or two in their pockets, of course, they binged on consumerism, but the hard core is still there.

Then again, Mrs Gray and her companion are not too perturbed about the absence of piped water. Her companion, when pressed, expresses a preference for shitting beneath a fig tree, rather than in a flush toilet. When workers recruited from Southern Italy
moved into subsidised housing in Turin, people used to say: ‘No use giving them baths, they'll only grow basil in them.' Mrs Gray would think that was an eminently sensible thing to do with a bath. After a couple of days of toting buckets, my own appreciation of any view would have waned, somewhat. But arduous circumstances never diminish Mrs Gray's rapt sense of wonder, and her book is dedicated to genuine austerity, an austerity reflected in many of the recipes she includes in her text. The section titled ‘Fasting on Naxos' describes just that: ‘The four weeks of the Advent fast and the six weeks of the Lenten one correspond with moments when on Naxos there was hardly anything to eat.'

She describes the harsh life of these Greek islanders without sentimentality, if with a degree of romantic awe, in a prose that will suddenly, effortlessly, fall into the very cadences of Sir Thomas Browne: ‘In Homer's time, a King could go out to plough his land and build his bed of giant timbers.' Her prose is usually ravishing, sometimes breathtaking. The entire section titled ‘Pasticceria and the Apulian Baroque' is composed according to the principles of the startling architectonics she describes:

The city [Lecce] within the walls calls to mind the Bourbon Kings of Naples, who once a year ordered the construction of castle edifices made of stout edible materials – gigantic hams, cheeses, enormous mortadelle, and the fore and hindquarters of deer and Indian buffalo, in order then to gloat at the spectacle of the starving Neapolitans – admitted at the moment of completion – vociferously and violently vying with each other, to the accompaniment of martial music and gunpowder explosions, in their destruction.

The book moves among its venues at the whim of memory, according to no precise chronology. With Mrs Gray, we eat dried beans cooked a variety of ways in a variety of places. We eat potatoes and green beans boiled together, potatoes with alliums (the common name of the onion family) and olive oil, potatoes cooked in the oven with streaky bacon. Some of her recipes would certainly ease the plight of the long-term unemployed in advanced, industrialised countries because, even here, the ingredients cost so little. Then again,
Honey from a Weed
is a very
expensive book. Such are the ironies of the politics of romantic austerity.

We make, with her, salads of hedgerow greens and boil up delicious weeds to eat hot with lemon juice – dandelions, comfrey, wood sorrel, field sorrel, wild fennel, fat hen, tassel hyacinth, purslane, field poppy. (When gathering your weeds, watch out for pesticides.) A meal may be made –
has
to be made – from whatever is to hand. M. F. K. Fisher's wolf (‘How to cook a wolf', included in
The Art of Eating
) was metaphorical. Patience Gray ‘met a number of people around Carrara not at all averse to cooking a fox', and tells you how to make fox
alla cacciatore
(with garlic, wine, and tomatoes). ‘Exactly the same method can be applied to a badger . . .'

A connoisseur of free food, she waxes lyrical on snails, especially the
Helix operta
, oval in shape, golden brown in colour, ‘with a beautiful logarithmic spiral structure'. Surely, of all the creatures we eat, we are most brutal to snails.
Helix operta
is dug out of the earth where he has been peacefully enjoying his summer sleep, cracked like an egg, and eaten raw, presumably alive. Or boiled in oil. Or roasted in the hot ashes of a wood fire. In Catalonia, vineyard snails are laid out in rows on a bed of straw. ‘The straw is set alight and the snails are retrieved from the ashes by jabbing them with sharply pointed sticks.' If God is a snail, Bosch's depictions of Hell are going to look like a vicarage tea-party.

Mrs Gray does not conceal the fact that the traditional communities she describes are now in the process of violent change. Her twenty years of wandering the limestone margins of the Mediterranean have coincided with the breakdown of ancient forms of village life:

It sometimes seems as if I have been rescuing a few strands from a former and more diligent way of life, now being eroded by an entirely new set of values. As with students of music who record old songs which are no longer sung, soon some of the things I record will also have vanished.

This is partly what makes her book so valuable, and gives it an elegiac quality that sometimes recalls the recent work of a writer, John Berger, with whom she might seem to have little else in
common except a respect for philosophical anarchism: Berger's majestic stories of peasant life,
Pig Earth
, invoke the awesome severities and orgiastic celebrations of a past as recent as yesterday and already as remote as the Flood.

The point is, dammit, that they
did
have, as Iago griped about Othello, a daily beauty in their lives that makes ours ugly. In one of the stories in
Pig Earth
, a little old peasant lady goes out and gathers wild things in the mountains – wild cherries, lilies of the valley, mushrooms, mistletoe – and takes her booty into the city, where she sells it in the market for vast sums. She is selling not only delicious wild produce but glimpses of some lost greenness. She is the last remaining vendor of wild things, she is a kind of ghost. Mrs Gray describes Carrara twenty years ago:

The feeling of the mountains was never far away: retired quarrymen sold bunches of herbs they had gathered there. In summer great baskets of bilberries and wild strawberries appeared. In autumn fresh cranberries, fungi and chestnuts were brought down from the Spanish chestnut woods. In this way a dialogue between town and country was maintained . . . In those days it was still possible to feel that the Carraresi were definitely in touch with the ‘earthly paradise'.

If transplanted Calabrians do grow basil in their shiny new bathtubs, perhaps they know what's what.

Mrs Gray has taken the form of the late-modern English-language cookery book to its extreme in
Honey from a Weed
, producing a kind of baroque monument of which all the moving parts work (the recipes are very sound).

(1987)

This precious stone set in the silver sea . . .

William Shakespeare

The narrator of Hanif Kureishi's ebulliant, dismayed farce introduces himself thus: ‘My name is Karim Amir, and I am an Englishman born and bred, almost.' Karim, a.k.a. ‘Creamy Jeans', is a child of Empire. When we first meet him, he lives with his Indian father and his English mother on the distant outskirts of London, enduring the last of school and the last of flower-power, in a state of near-terminal late-adolescent angst.

But Karim's story will prove to be most English in its heritage – that of the glorious, scabrous, picaresque, savage, sentimental tradition of low comedy that stretches from Chaucer to the dirty postcards on Brighton Pier.
The Buddha of Suburbia
is also as much an up-yours for our times as
Lucky Jim
was for the Fifties, and Kureishi himself offers another signpost in Chapter One, when Eva, Karim's father's lover, gives the boy a copy of
Candide
.

But, in some respects, Candide had it easy compared to Karim. ‘I was sick of being affectionately called Shitface and Curryface.' Jamila, militant feminist, black radical, and his best friend, defines the problem: ‘The thing was, we were supposed to be English, but to the English, we were always wogs and nigs and Pakis and the rest of it.'

Karim's world is soon turned upside down. His father, Haroon leaves his sweet, downtrodden wife to live with sexy, trendy Eva and practise as a guru. (He is the Buddha of the title.) Jamila, to her fury, is bullied and cajoled into an arranged marriage with the aimiable buffoon, Changez, who demands, as part of the dowry, a complete set of the works of Conan Doyle. Karim moves to the big city. Life opens up. He starts a career as an
actor, his first role, to Jamila's disgust, Mowgli, in what she dubs
The Jungle Bunny Book
. Punk happens. Charlie, Eva's son, turns into a successful pop singer, although Karim is keen to assure he is a very bad one.

Karim is worshipfully in love with Charlie; by the novel's end, he has grown out of it. But
The Buddha of Suburbia
isn't so much a coming-of-age novel as a coming-to-terms novel, coming to terms with a world in which nothing, neither pleasure, nor politics, nor power, can be taken on trust. Not even violence. When a girl-friend's father turns his dog on Karim, expectations are reversed with a vengeance: ‘I knew by now what the dog was up to. The dog was in love with me – quick movements against my arse told me so.'

The sexual black comedy of this episode is cruel, hilarious and desperate; Karim is training himself rigorously to see the funny side. Irony is his defence and his weapon. The ribald subject-matter is exquisitely set off by the louche prissiness of Karim's diction: ‘I contemplated myself with and my wardrobe with loathing and would willingly have urinated over every garment.' When I say
The Buddha of Suburbia
is wonderfully well written, I mean it is continually tasty and interesting and full of glee. It is not like Penelope Fitzgerald.

In fact, it may be the first novel in what I trust will be a rapidly growing and influential genre – the novel designed
on purpose
to exclude itself from the Booker short-list. There's not only the richly vulgar vein of body comedy – Hanif Kureishi finds every aspect of physicality from mastectomy to anal intercourse ruefully mirthful – but he remains wonderfully Right On, politically, and lets the middle classes play little if any role in this world of squats and anti-racisim and dishevelled integrity.

He can't find a bad word to say about women, either, which is a lovely thing in this period of fashionable misogyny, but it does mean that Jamila and Eva and poor old Mum are touched with a little bit of unexpected sugar. And if some minor characters – such as Uncle Ted, the central heating engineer and part-time football hooligan – spring at once to pulsing life, others, like Jamila's mother, now a grocer, once a princess, haven't got much to do except stand round looking picturesque.

The novel ends with a wedding announcement – Haroon and Eva's – and a party. Karim ponders how things have been a mess
but soon will go better. There's a sting in the tail; it is election night, in the fatal year of 1979.

A radical feminist I know paid
My Beautiful Launderette
, the movie scripted by Hanif Kureishi, her ultimate accolade: ‘It almost made me like men.' His first novel almost made me nostalgic for that messy but on the whole optimistic decade, the Seventies. It is a wonderful novel. I doubt I will read a funnier, or one with more heart, this year.

(1990)

There is an old song by Ewan MacColl, a favourite in folk clubs thirty years ago and more, ‘Dirty Old Town'. It's about Salford and enshrines all the often-parodied clichés of social realist art of the time, mucky canal and all. One day, though, the singer is going to tear that dirty old town down. Then it will be goodbye to the dark, Satanic mills for ever.

Well, the dark, Satanic mills are gone for good now. Manufacturing industry has departed this country and the great Northern cities have died even more speedily than they were born, when they doubled, tripled, tripled again their size, filth, complexity, poverty, wealth during the course of the nineteenth century. The Conservative government under Margaret Thatcher accomplished in eight years a more radical razing of mill and foundry and pit and shipyard than any pinko troubadour ever dreamed of.

But this peremptory cleansing has left these cities bereft of everything except their inhabitants, who eke out their scant resources picking over the local tip, as described by Ian Jack in Birkenhead, in 1985. Or they can set out to scour the country for work, like post-industrial versions of the Joad family in
The Grapes of Wrath
.