Food for contemplation from Joanne Harris

Western culture has led us to feel suspicious of things that give us pleasure, Joanne Harris, author of best-selling novel Chocolat, tells MARGIE THOMSON.

What would the author of three very moreish novels, Chocolat, Blackberry Wine and Five Quarters of the Orange, in which food is an adorable central character, eat if she could have anything she wanted?

Joanne Harris' day of perfect eating would be spent at her grandfather's place on the small French island of Noirmoutier in southern Brittany. It would be a summer day, and she would welcome it with a bowl of hot chocolate - what else? - and the unique bread of France.

Then this literary queen whose fame to date is a rich aroma of French home-cooking, optimism and joie de vivre, albeit seared with something that smells a little like the fires of hell, would look forward to a lunch of roast lamb, deliciously spiked with big pieces of garlic and rosemary. Her grandmother's recipe, of course. In Harris' world, no one ever really dies: beloveds are kept alive by the recipes they have contributed to the family tradition, scrawled in their handwriting on scraps of paper, collected together in huge files and folders.

The lamb would be accompanied by green salad, something slightly bitter and dandeliony, and tomato salad. Maybe green beans, nothing fancy.

After the gastronomic exuberance of her three novels, it's funny to learn that Harris is the laziest cook in her family who, unless it is a truly special occasion, prefers rapid, easy things, and who for years ate neither sauces nor dressings.

But after those unadorned greens, a fancy cake, bought from a shop.

Perhaps champagne with light, fluffy biscuits to finish off. And later, much later, a supper of light tomato and basil soup with more tomato and green salads, and cold meats, pates, sausages.

Ah, she remembers her fisherman grandfather's little sardine barbecue, and how the pungent black smoke would fill the air. And the bowl of figs on the table for dessert, some of the thousands from his tree ... Her one day of perfect eating has become confused with other days, with a lifetime of huge family occasions, with the 12-course meals her French mother still cooks at Christmas time, with the good brioche that as a child she would grab for her afternoon snack and run off with, still eating, still playing.

That island was the place for Harris' childhood holidays. Ordinary life was lived back in Barnsley, a Yorkshire town where her French mother went to live after marrying a young Englishman she met at a dance. There, they lived above Harris' English grandparents' sweet-shop, and her parents both taught French at a local school. Harris grew up speaking French at home, and feeling different from the people around her.

"It was a very closed community, and some people hadn't met a foreigner before. But we were always a close family. All children want to fit in at a certain age, but if you don't you tend to find resources and methods of dealing with it that you grow into and which become useful.

"But it's not always a happy process of learning to adapt."

The strong sense of herself that she developed as a result of her difference to those around her has found its way into her novels in a powerfully positive way. Her novels celebrate both individuality, and also the traditions that remind people of who they are and where they come from.

Joanne met her husband Kevin when they were both teenagers. He went to Hull University; she, to her surprise, was offered a place at Cambridge, where she went at her mother's insistence to study literature. But "all the boys there were called Rupert," and she couldn't wait to get back to her Kevin. The couple soon after bought a rather ordinary house in Barnsley for £9000, where they live to this day.

The garden is filled with the herbs Harris grows for medicinal and culinary purposes: lavender for headaches, basil for salads, lemon balm or mint for drinks or to cut in huge drifts for the bathtub. She may not like dressings on her salad, but she is no ascetic.

The couple have a daughter, 7-year-old Anouchka, and Harris' parents live in the same street - great for babysitting, although Harris remarks that she and Kevin watch rather a lot of videos these days.

It all seemed so ordinary, with little to portend the tidal wave of fame and fortune that struck a little over three years ago. Harris, like her parents, was a French teacher with a blossoming career, and a private passion for writing. She had had two novels published - a horror story called The Evil Seed and a Victorian gothic thriller called Sleep, Pale Sister - which had sunk like stones, and three further ones in a variety of genres which were languishing unpublished. She was thinking that she would have one last go. But what should she write about?

Just then, her football-loving husband said something that would change their lives: "Football is to men what chocolate is to women."

Later, this husband who has been in marketing all his working life and who Harris says has a wonderful instinct for a saleable idea, said: "Chocolate, it's the big thing, you really should write a book about chocolate."

Thinking about it as she got the dinner that night, Harris realised that chocolate - delicious, addictive, fattening - does embody that crucial complexity necessary for a good story.

"It turned out to be much more complex than I'd first imagined because it isn't just a pleasure, it gives all kinds of conflicting feelings to people depending on their attitude to it. I think a lot of pleasures are like that, and the nature of pleasure in itself is really quite dual, because a lot of people seem to be afraid of pleasure generally.

"Things that give pleasure are regarded with suspicion very often. Western culture has led us in a direction where we feel suspicious of things that give us pleasure because we think they might be bad for us."

So she wrote a "parochial" little story about a transient and slightly magical woman called Vianne who establishes a chocolaterie just opposite the church in a little town in the French alps, opening just on Lent and thereby attracting the hatred of the black-hearted priest.

It was an instant success ("Is this the best book ever written?" gasped the Literary Review) and is now adding to its enormous international audience by way of a film starring Juliette Binoche, Dame Judi Dench, Alfred Molina, Lena Olin and Johnny Depp.

It's in New Zealand cinemas, and be warned: after seeing it you'll need Harris' recipe for hot chocolate. Suffice to say that she usually heats "proper chocolate powder" with milk and sugar in a pan, adding vanilla and sometimes ginger. But the piece de resistance, which anyone who has seen the film will be curious about, is chocolate with chilli. Not chilli powder, she hastens to add - "all you'll get is brown scum" - but a fresh chilli, sliced in half, added to the hot chocolate mixture and left to infuse for around 10 minutes.

The Herald can report that the result, especially if the drink is prepared with melted dark chocolate, is sensational, and as close to being in Vianne's chocolaterie in Lansquenet as one is ever likely to get.

Despite some earlier public comments about Bob Jacobs' film script for Chocolat ("It's okay, but dumbed-down a little, with a few minor but annoying character changes," she told one reporter), she now declares herself very happy with the result.

Harris is working on the screenplay for her just-finished (and as yet unpublished) novel called Coastliners which, while set in France, scarcely mentions food and is about "a community who tries to steal a beach."

Chocolat was quickly followed by Blackberry Wine, also set in Lansquenet, and, this month, by Five Quarters of the Orange (Black Swan, $26.95).

It doesn't do this threesome justice to say that, together, they are a homage to French food, but no one evokes the deliciousness of food and drink the way Harris does. To describe them simply in those terms ties them too closely with that patronising genre where English people go to France and gush about the charm of village life and the quality of the food.

Not only is Harris' view that of the insider, but her novels are the kind of multi-layered delights that seem to be about one thing, but are actually about a number of others: the tension, or blurring, between good and evil, heroes and villains; concerns that arise from that alienation she experienced as a child; that people can be undone from within as much as by outside forces.

"Both Chocolate and Five Quarters are stories about small communities in difficult, stressful circumstances, and how the chemistry is irrevocably changed by the addition of a new element," she explains.

While some others might on Harris' behalf become anxious about her living in an unprepossessing town such as Barnsley ("I wonder, privately, if she might be better off in London," muses one reporter), Harris herself has no such thoughts. Half-French she may be, but she's half stolid English, too, and far too sensible and intelligent to pull up her roots.

"People see me as someone who's won the lottery by a kind of fluke, and people who win the lottery usually splash out, don't they, and they buy a big Ferrari, a big house and a big fur coat and they get a big circle of rich friends and they join the local golf club and they rise in the social echelons. This is how lottery winners are perceived.

"But a book is not a lottery win. In my case certainly I hope that the books are going to be a career.

"I don't intend to sit around doing nothing, and I really have very little interest in social climbing, attending swanky parties or anything like that. So what I see it as, really, is an investment for the future, which means that I have to be awfully careful about all this ... I can't think of anything worse than having to pull everything up and go and live in London ... I'm very happy the way I am."

The biggest change she has made in the face of her success has been to give up teaching, becoming a full-time writer, and you get the feeling that in some ways she even considers this slightly rash. But it means she gets more time to spend with her husband and daughter, and possible social isolation is offset by the demand she is in to speak at literary events around the globe.

The danger of success such as hers - quality fiction which has nevertheless found a mass market - could be that she becomes a kind of product, in thrall to the marketplace.

In New Zealand, a market in which sales of 5000 are usually considered good, 22,000 copies of Chocolat have sold, and so far, 15,000 copies of Five Quarters have failed to quell demand.

She has watched her name becoming ever more prominent on the covers of her books, sitting over the title on her latest, and thinks it funny but not portentous.

"Fortunately," Harris says, "I have a publisher who is not simply interested in selling my books but in seeing me happy. I've got a very nice, understanding editor, and when I said to her that my next novel is not about food, or about France, she just smiled happily."

Everyone, it seems, is very happy, and Harris is busy doing what she does best, which is to do with being true to herself. "I just ask myself, what is the story I want to write next, then go ahead with it and see what happens," she says.

But that's for tomorrow. Right now, it's getting late and she's going to hang up the phone and have a glass of red wine. Then she's going to bed. Which seems a nice - and wholly characteristic - combination of French indulgence and English sensibleness

* Joanne Harris will be a guest at the Auckland Writers' Festival next month.