Will you last beyond the madeleine? Radio 4’s In Search of Lost Time reviewed

The madeleine upon which Proust’s seven-volume epic In Search of Lost Time pivots makes its significant appearance after just 18 minutes in the new Radio 4 adaptation — with which, if you’re not obsessed with the Ashes or holed up with the family in some dank seaside cottage, you can while away this bank holiday weekend. It’s always a surprise to realise that the most significant cake ever baked (after Alfred’s burnt tarts) makes its fictional appearance so soon, almost before Proust’s characters, Swann, Gilberte and the Guermantes, have taken shape in your mind. The narrator, now grown up, is offered a cup of tea and a fresh madeleine by his mother and taken back in time to those holidays as a child at his great-aunt Léonie’s house in the French countryside. The madeleine by itself is not the trigger. It’s the combination of scent and taste — the lime herbal tea, those few crumbs of sweet plain scalloped sponge — ‘like souls, remembering, waiting, hoping, among the ruins of everything else, and carrying without flinching… the whole edifice of memory’.