BigPig,LittlePig — not a self-centered memoir
Frances Wilson reviews Big Pig, Little Pig by Jacqueline Yallop.
Twelve years ago, Jacqueline Yallop and her husband, Ed, both writers, moved from Sheffield to a farmhouse in Mas de Maury in the department of Aveyron, south-west France.
Their new location is described as a place of “isolation”, “incremental loss”, and “unromantic hardship”. Their neighbours are paysans: people of the land. After much discussion the couple decide to purchase two pigs and raise them for meat.
It is a sensible, unemotional decision: there was a time when every smallholding had a pig, and pigs will connect the English newcomers to the traditions of their community. Killing a pig, they realise, is “an act of belonging”. It is also an investment: Jacqueline and Ed will feed the pigs for 12 months, after which the pigs will feed Jacqueline and Ed.
Enter Big Pig and Little Pig (not being pets, their names simply tell them apart), 12-week-old weaners from an ancient breed called gascon noir. They are charming and intelligent with fluffy fringes, knobbly knees and bristly black manes. Big Pig seems wise, dependable and introvert- ed, while Little Pig (who is only marginally smaller) is skittish, a tad selfish perhaps, and an extrovert.
Their characters come as a surprise to Yallop, but are her observations, she wonders, casual anthropomorphism? Yallop loves watching Big Pig and Little Pig snuffling and shuffling about, their tails twirling and whirling; she loves the cheer of their hefty pig-presence and daily busyness. She brings a plastic chair into their shelter so that she can spend time with the swine, watching them fuss over the comfort of their nest and indulge, as she puts it, “their incessant curiosity for what lies just below the next layer of sticky soil”.
The bulk of this quietly devastating book is taken up with pig-watching. Yallop writes with great tenderness about the hogs as housekeepers and gourmands; their dislike of courgettes, the warmth with which they befriend the family dog. She thinks deeply about the life she and Ed share with the pigs and the life they share with the paysans, who would be baffled by animal sentimentality.
During a long, dry summer, the pigs “laugh with glee” in the hosepipe shower, and bound after the pears that Yallop rolls down the hill. They are putting on several kilos a week — Big Pig reaches 375lb — and fast outgrowing their shelter, so they move to a larger expanse of wooded land, a deluxe enclosure built on acorns and truffles. Being too heavy to heave into a truck, Big Pig and Little Pig walk to their new home, led by Jacqueline and Ed. It’s an ambling, romantic stroll, the pigs sashaying down the lane, snacking on hawthorn and blackthorn. Their pig-walk, Yallop recalls, was the “strangest” and “most beautiful thing” that she and Ed had done in their married life.
Interspersed with Yallop’s descriptions of Big Pig and Little Pig are her responses to the pigs she is reading about. She returns to the slaughter scenes in Lark Rise to Candleford (“the killing was … as savage as anything to be seen”), and Jude the Obscure (“the dying animal’s cry assumed its third and final tone, the shriek of agony”). And she reads about the adventures of an 18th-century celebrity show-hog known as the Learned Pig, who was owned first by an Irish impresario called Samuel Bisset and then by John Nicholson. Sporting a red waistcoat, the Learned Pig was able to tell the time, guess the age of members of the audience, and, using a pack of alphabet cards, correctly spell out their names. The sensation of the age, the Learned Pig gripped the imaginations of Samuel Johnson, William Blake, and Robert Southey. He even gets a mention in Wordsworth’s long poem The Prelude.
Yallop asks simple questions which have complex answers. What do pigs mean to us? Why do we endow them with human qualities, and also present them as the lowest of the low: filthy, smelly, slothful beasts? And, most importantly, how many people these days know what it means to kill a pig?
The narrative’s roller-coaster ride presses forward its own questions. Will Jacqueline and Ed change their minds? Will the pigs, after all, become pets? The blurb calls it a “life-affirming memoir” and so we wait for a last-minute reprieve.
But Big Pig, Little Pig is not lifeaffirming, it’s death-affirming. For life-affirming, watch Babe. Yallop’s tale is a love story, a thriller, a meditation on meat eating, on farming animals, on the relations between man and beast. Most importantly, it puts a stun-gun to the genre of self-loving, soft-centred memoirs in which an Englishman describes his idyllic year in the South of France.
Big Pig, Little Pig by Jacqueline Yallop is published by Penguin.