Book Review: Land of Milk and Honey by C Pam Zhang

Having read Zhang’s previous novel, How Much of These Hills is Gold, I knew to expect a novel that played with reality, one that would introduce strange and wonderful elements and leave me to decide what was real and what might not be. That’s exactly what I got with Land of Milk and Honey.

At some unnamed point in the future, a thick smog has descended on most of the earth. This deep pollution has killed out a majority of animals and plants and left humans struggling to survive particularly as it has destroyed so many crops and food sources. Our narrator is a chef, originally from California but living and working in Europe. She is still working in a restaurant at the beginning of the story but obviously this is a dying industry as ingredients are steadily snuffed out. She can’t return home as America has closed its borders and has a long waiting list of wannabe returnees. She is seen as less desirable, in a large part because she is Chinese-American. She applies to an unusual job as a chef and, after lying about her credentials, is awarded the position and moves to a mountain in Italy.

This mountain is one of the last places on Earth where the smog has not reached and has become a private country owned by a wealthy man she only ever refers to as her employer. Here, her employer is attempting to remake the world with vast quantities of crops, livestock, and those wealthy enough and willing to invest. Our narrator is hired as a private chef to cook meals for the insanely wealthy with some of the last ingredients on earth. She becomes enmeshed with her employer’s daughter, Aida (the only named character in the story), who is perhaps the true brains behind the operation. Aida is passionate about the science of saving species and is in charge of the extensive labs that operate in secret below the mountain. Here they are bringing back species from extinction – woolly mammoth, Tasmanian tiger – and in the narrator’s kitchen she prepares these delicacies for the wealthy to feast on.

But there are outside forces pushing back against her employer’s control of the mountain, particularly as it becomes more and more clear that he controls such resources. And our narrator’s role in the land of milk and honey is more complicated than simply one of cook as she is also required to take on a persona to convince more wealthy investors. At the same time, her relationship with Aida adds further complexities.

The descriptions throughout the novel are lush and beautiful and horrific. Descriptions of land and food, excess and decay bring the reader right into the kitchen and on to the mountain. Your mouth will water reading this book. Zhang really brings the contrast between the impoverishment of most of the world and the excess of the mountain dwellers to light – something that should remind us uncomfortably of the variance in quality of life that exists in our world currently.

At the same time, the characterization never quite got there for me. We learn quite a bit about our narrator and her personal history (and since she was a first person narrator, her lack of a name didn’t bother me too much) but never quite enough about her employer or about Aida. By the end of the book I was left with so many unanswered questions. My main issue though was that I never believed that an authentic relationship was growing between the narrator and Aida. I believe the passion and intensity in the moment between them but I don’t believe that this was a deep relationship or one with any true lasting power and yet the conclusion of the novel seems to want us to think that. Perhaps this also stems from the fact that I had a hard time rooting for any of the characters. To me, their careless manner of playing god with the fate of the world and their excessive consumption and waste meant that I kept wanting to get away from them. And the longer the narrator stayed with her employer and Aida, the less I saw her as someone I wanted to root for either.