The Song of Lunch

Christopher Reid’s The Song of Lunch is the decisive literary and visual point of departure for the novel’s restaurant-centered espionage story. First encountered through a television dramatization, it gives the writer an image of a meal haunted by an earlier love; later, that same image becomes a lens through which the novel’s narrator reads his own lunch and the changed restaurant around him.

Source and Creative Origin

The story’s seed, as described in the acknowledgments, was planted in California while the writer watched the Masterpiece dramatization of Christopher Reid’s poem. Alan Rickman and Emma Thompson’s performances held his attention and prompted a specific formal question: whether an espionage tale could take place entirely around a restaurant table. The finished story does not keep wholly to that restriction, but remains mostly within it, turning the restaurant meal into the organizing frame for a spy narrative.

The idea did not immediately become a draft. The writer first made notes, then returned to another book; roughly a year later, while enduring an August visit with in-laws in Novi Sad, Serbia, he rediscovered them. He describes the story as arriving after that period of unconscious gestation, followed by a month of continuous writing. The Song of Lunch thus stands not simply as a cited influence but as the work that first suggested the novel’s unusual spatial constraint.

A Personal Route to the Dramatization

The novel’s narrator recalls encountering the dramatization after a painful evening with Linda, a new recruit from California. He considered her attractive, fun, smart, and witty, but understood as he dressed and watched her smiling from beneath the sheets that their relationship had reached its end. Rather than acknowledge that ending, he acted as though nothing had changed, kissed her nose, and left for his empty apartment.

There, he began drinking heavily and turned on the television. Flipping through channels, he came upon the dramatization. The recollection links the work to a moment when the narrator was already stung by love and unwilling to face a parting plainly. His private situation does not duplicate the story he watches; instead, it gives the later restaurant scene an emotional point of comparison, joining the borrowed image of old lovers with his own sense of loss.

The Restaurant as an Intertextual Lens

While waiting at Rendez-vous, the narrator sees himself in The Song of Lunch’s man, who meets an old flame for lunch at their former haunt, Zanotti’s. He understands that figure as imagining that time has altered neither the people nor the place. The expectation is contradicted by a modernized restaurant: the old haunt has been given a whitewash, and the narrator recognizes a comparable transformation in Rendez-vous.

The reference therefore works on two levels. The poem’s dramatized meeting supplies a pattern for the narrator’s anticipation of a lunch shaped by remembered intimacy, while the changed restaurant makes the persistence of memory collide with material change. The novel borrows the situation of lovers returning to an old setting, then places that recognition inside an espionage narrative whose intended action is mostly contained around a restaurant table.