Review by Woodrow Phoenix
‘Alley’ is a restaurant located on a busy High Street in East Dulwich, a suburban South London neighbourhood. For five years it has served the kind of complex, contemporary dishes you see being created on television series such as MasterChef or Culinary Class Wars. The talented chef whose food gathers lots of critical praise and customers is a blonde thirty-something woman called Claudia, who owns and operates her restaurant alongside her close friend and talented pastry chef Lisa, who she met in cooking school.
The Pass, written and drawn by Katriona Chapman, follows the lives of Claudia, Lisa and their inventive young sommelier Ben over the course of a busy year. It is an ensemble drama carefully and expertly presented in the textured, pencilled, colourwash style seen in Chapman’s previous books Follow Me In and Breakwater. Unlike those two which featured spectacular views of the cities and countries that the characters moved through, The Pass takes place on a much less expansive canvas. There are almost none of her full page architectural renderings of place to introduce a location or give us the sense of a particular setting. Everything is shown at ground level close to the characters, and the smaller stage means you need to read carefully to work out where, and sometimes when, many of the scenes happen by looking at details of furniture and interiors.
That visual choice condenses the scope of this drama to a domestic level, emphasising the everyday pressure of a high-stakes business that leaves Claudia with barely any life outside the relentless grind of designing menus, planning and creating exciting food, seeing it all consumed and then prepping for the next day’s servings. It’s a treadmill starting with 5am visits to fish and meat markets and ending after midnight every night, which means she needs to trust Lisa to manage the money side of the business and the staff. It’s a balancing act, but they can only balance on a knife edge for so long. Sooner or later something is going to slip.
As a character study, The Pass is most interesting for its behind the scenes look at the challenges and pitfalls of the famously ruinous food industry but that engine drives a book with a few tricks up its sleeve. Chapman does some subtle work on a structural level with pacing and flashbacks that hide in plain sight. That may lead you to think a big question goes unanswered in the last few pages, but everything you need to understand what Claudia does is in there somewhere. You might just have to revisit the beginning to get to the end.
