Consuming Surfaces: Decadent Aesthetics in The Debt to Pleasure

John Lanchester's darkly funny The Debt to Pleasure (1996) mixes genres such as the cookbook, the travelogue, and the detective story. Its Decadent narrator, Tarquin Winot, is a gourmet, an aesthete, and a murderer. As narrator, Tarquin is keen to provide the reader a glittering surface but to deny access to his story's hidden meanings. A critical approach to the novel through theories of artifice drawn from nineteenth-century Decadence challenges recent theories of surface reading, and argues that the text's surface, its literary style, is not transparent, but an aesthetic means that makes more visible the artifice of fiction.