Hungry ghosts: Land of Milk and Honey by C. Pam Zhang

C. Pam Zhang’s debut novel, How Much Of These Hills Is Gold, was, for me, incredibly promising but uneven and overloaded. Despite its flaws, I wrote at the time: ‘I’d much rather read something like this than a bland, competent book, and I’ll look out for more from Zhang.’ So it’s so great to read their second novel, Land of Milk and Honey, and find that it’s clearly composed by a writer who’s now absolutely in control of their craft, although I suspect Zhang’s masterpiece is still to come. Land of Milk and Honey is set in a near-future where 98% of the world’s food supplies have been destroyed by an unshiftable smog, which blocks sunlight and wreaks havoc with arable crops and animal life-cycles alike. Our narrator is a Chinese-American chef who’s nearing thirty in a world where life expectancies have been dramatically reduced due to the air quality – her age group have been nicknamed ‘The Mayfly Generation’. She takes a job at a mountaintop colony where the skies are clear and the rich continue to access the dishes of the past, from the bitter greens that our protagonist craves to the last remaining Bresse chickens and pastries heavy with real butter. Her employer seems to want her to step sexlessly into the place of his vanished Asian wife, but it’s his adult daughter, Aida, whom she’s drawn to.

This could be read as a simplistic moral rant about the greed of the rich – how there would be enough food to go round, even in this world, if they would only share, how disgusting it is for them to gorge themselves while the rest of the world subsists on mung-protein flour – but I think Land of Milk and Honey is more complex than that. Our narrator becomes complicit in this colony, and inspired by Aida’s zeal, especially when Aida explains how her scientific work has already contributed to the world through developing ‘a cultivar of mung beans that grow in the dark’, the crop that has sustained the world through providing calories, if not taste, and how the Italian government confiscated their research and ‘used our work to make another monoculture’. Aida’s father is a kind of Elon Musk or Stockton Rush figure, blinded by his own belief in himself and his right to operate outside boundaries, but Aida’s morals are considerably more interesting.

Zhang’s writing is also, simply, stunning. This book reminded me of both Melissa Broder’s Milk Fed and Ayesha Manazir Siddiqi’s The Centre in its evocation of what we consume and when we go hungry, and there are set-piece chapters that just blaze out of the text: the opening chapter, a confrontation with a key investor, a ‘slumming’ trip to Milan for a bit of food tourism. The ending is unexpected in the best of ways; I always enjoy eco-dystopias that move away from being simply portents of doom, and Zhang achieves this beautifully. Where Land of Milk and Honey lost me slightly was in the bits in between its key moments, which tend to blur into a litany of dishes and desire, keeping the reader too distant. The way Aida was written crystallised these problems for me: she’s a fascinating character, but I felt very little emotion towards her until very late in the day. The narrator is clearly reconnecting with her own self and perhaps some of this numbness is feeding through, and the last few paragraphs are incredibly moving, but I wish I could have been as mesmerised by this whole book as I was by its final chapters.

I received a free proof copy of this novel from the publisher for review.