Published 2001 / Length 363 pages
Five Quarters of the Orange is a dark, bitter tale of shattered lives and lost loves in rural France during the Second World War. We see the scenes of betrayal and retribution unfolding through the eyes of a nine-year-old girl, Framboise, who, as mistress of her rural world, fishes obsessively in the river while she struggles to cope with her increasingly tyrannical and migraine-ridden mother and builds a rapport with a soldier from the occupying German Army, Thomas Leibniz. The tastes, textures and meaning of food inhabit the book; the scent of oranges especially pervades it, as Framboise exploits its capacity to incapacitate her mother (for reasons we begin to guess at), thus providing Framboise and her siblings with opportunities to escape their mother’s controlling clutches. But when the children do elude her influence, they are in wartime France. In such an environment, small misadventures become writ large. As the plot twists and turns to the fireworks of the climax, so it proves. Five Quarters of the Orange is an engrossing story of mothers and daughters, of old loves made anew, of revenge and hatred.
‘It’s a real page-turner – every bit as captivating as Chocolat, but much darker and all the more rewarding for that. The interlacing of recipes with plot is intriguing, but the invented language is rather annoying, so it’s just as well it makes only brief appearances.’ – JAMES, 53
• Are these children especially wicked, or are their wicked actions merely amplified because it is wartime?
• What are we expected to believe Thomas Liebniz’s motivation is for spending so much time with the children, and especially with Framboise?
• What conclusions do you draw from the book about the nature of childhood then and now? Consider the issues of freedom and control.
• As in Harris’s other books, food is portrayed as an agent in society, a force in its own right – although in this case a negative rather than a positive one, as in Chocolat. How well do the descriptions of food fit the narrative?
• Five Quarters of the Orange was Harris’s follow-up book to the hugely successful Chocolat (1999), which made her a household name.
• The novel is based on the experiences of Harris’s French maternal grandfather, who had been decorated in the war, but was then denounced to the Gestapo by an acquaintance who was in the Resistance. As a result, the family were forced to flee and hide away on a relative’s distant farm.
• Chocolat by JOANNE HARRIS – this is a perfect sweet complement to the bitterness of Five Quarters.
• Like Water for Chocolate by LAURA ESQUIVEL – food and cooking dominate another tale of mothers and daughters.
• Captain Corelli’s Mandolin by LOUIS DE BERNIÈRES (see here) – similar scenes of a small rural world caught up in the larger geo-political battle of the Second World War.