Book review: Baking Cakes in Kigali

Published on Wednesday 14 January 2009 16:07

by Gaile Parkin Atlantic Books, 384pp, £12.99 Review by TOM ADAIR

LIKE THE CAKES TO WHICH ITStitle refers, this novel is selling fast to readers in America, Scandanavia, the Middle East and Europe. Baking cakes is a ritualistic domestic activity (less and less commonplace, and therefore increasingly charged with nostalgic force), full of heady, seductive, sensory allusions: the warmth of the oven, the promise of plenty, of deliciousness to come.

You taste right away the title's power in that sheer evocativeness. But wait! What of the paradox, the tensions aroused by that other inclusion, the taste not of life but of death – in the word Kigali?

Gaile Parkin posts her intention early – up front in the title – to face the tough issues of pain and loss, of death and survival against the odds. Set in Rwanda after the 1990s genocide, her novel homes in on Angel Tungaraza, its cake-baking heroine, the stay-at-home wife of Pius, a Tanzanian helping the local university to raise funds.

Angel's status, as both an African, yet an outsider, empathetic, yet objective in considering her neighbours' tribulations (while harbouring her own), is the key to this novel's deserved success.

While facing tragedy, Angel is upbeat, determined and busy. Oh, how she bakes! – at least one cake in each of the 14 self-contained chapters. And, oh! – what cakes. She is the Faberg of the cake world, an artist-cum-businesswoman, a fount of worldly wisdom. Her son and daughter, Joseph and Vinas, are lately dead – one killed by bullets, the other by Aids – and Angel and Pius's daily life is bound up in raising their five orphaned grandchildren.

At dead of night, while Pius sleeps, Angel, hot and menopausal, tosses and worries, hatching her plans. They live in a compound which is guarded, a telltale sign of still perilous times. The neighbours are privileged foreigners, the poorest of whom are the English volunteers, Sophie and Catherine, here to devote themselves to charitable work, a concept some Africans struggle to grasp.

One such is the straight-laced Mrs Wanyika, wife of the Tanzanian ambassador, a key client who spreads the word about Angel's prowess at piping icing. Keen lovers of cake will find this novel hard to read on an empty stomach for Parkin's descriptions of Angel's concoctions verge on pornography for the tastebuds. The cakes are various, and stunning: representations of an aeroplane, or a banknote, a rose-dressed christening cake frilled with lace. Angel's artistry is unstinting; likewise her talent for pouring balm into others' lives.

She is the hub of the whole community, acting as matchmaker, public speaker, shoulder to cry on, marriage counsellor, surrogate mother and latterly mentor to Girls Who Mean Business, a group of budding entrepreneurs. With them she discusses business ethics. She takes up the cause of Catherine and Sophie when their water charges exceed their means to pay. Moral good and social justice are her hallmarks, while never, ever, does she fail to drive a hard bargain, procure the best price, and know her own worth in her everyday dealings.

Moral issues and ethical conflicts rear up benignly. So, which does Angel value more highly – friendship or business? Is sticking to principles more important than losing a client, or even a friend? When Parkin presents the common-sense Angel with such dilemmas, the issue is often soft in the middle or sometimes fudged, in the sense that the cost of acting correctly is never punitive.

On the other hand, in the novel's single instance when right and wrong are clear to see, and the future course of a young woman's life is weighed in the balance, Angel's fortitude deserts her – and Parkin lets her off the hook by a sleight of plot that evades one wrong by committing another.

Which means that the novel's plane of morality is shallow – issues arise but are rarely explored. Angel is flawed. You believe her complexity and her behaviour – she is the novel's towering achievement – along with the sense Parkin creates of a country riven by its past yet seeking repair. Written with style, yet never flash, Baking Cakes in Kigali makes you feel better about the world. But only just.