Joanne Harris Moves Backwards in Time with 'Chocolat' Heroine 'Vianne'

In Vianne, internationally renowned and award-winning author, Joanne Harris, presents the prequel to her best-selling novel, Chocolat. Set six years prior to the events of Chocolat, a woman known as Sylviane Rochas leaves New York after the death of her mother in search of a new life in Marseille. Soon after she arrives, she changes her name to Vianne and, using her limited set of skills, finds a waitressing job at a local restaurant. According to Harris, “When we meet her at the beginning of Vianne, she’s 21, she’s just scattered her mother’s ashes in the Hudson River in New York and got on a plane to Marseille on the south coast of France, which is a city she doesn’t know and for the first time in her life, she is traveling alone and she has choices to make. She’s in the very early stages of her pregnancy that she didn’t plan… She doesn’t know what kind of mother she’s going to be. She has very few skills of any kind, but she does have some intelligence… and she’s planning, hopefully, to find a place to settle down…. her mother has always made the decisions regarding what they’re going to do next, where they are going to go and they have never stayed in a place… for more than a few weeks at a time… she’s not used to having a job, having roots, making friends, understanding the people around her because she’s always been warned off doing those things because they’re dangerous.”

Throughout Vianne and the earlier Chocolat novels, chocolate plays a central role. What was it about this particular food that inspired Harris to feature it in her storytelling? She explains, “…chocolate is so different to any other kind of food. It has so many potential sources of story. It has this very long history, this very interesting folklore. It’s an ancient product which has come from the South American tradition, but has managed to find its way somehow into every country in the world since then and has gone through a number of changes… it has religious significance, has a tremendous amount of cultural and historic significance, is now incredibly vital to the economy of the world… particularly in Catholic countries, this idea of chocolate of being a sin has entered social consciousness, and so I wanted to write a book that was effectively about the dynamics of church and chocolate, fasting and feasting, against a background of Catholicism and paganism…”

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