Curing The Pig - review by Steve Redwood (Whispers of Wickedness) 040305
Extract of review :
...one of the great strengths of this book is precisely that it is a bit like one of Mam’s stews, an enormous variety of tastes and flavours from which all blandness has been banned.
Indeed, this occasional showing-off (and a rather poorly worked out version of the three wishes idea) is about the only weakness to be found in the book. It is chock-a-block with delightful and even hilarious scenes, such as the hero’s christening, his father Dai’s final epic battle against his Mam, Pritchard-Evans the Limp’s delight in finding the corpses of Morgan’s parents, the son’s shock when the vicar plans to bury his parents together. And that’s just the early part of the book!
The characters are superb, many recalling Stella Gibbons - but wilder and funnier, if not so deeply drawn - or Dickens, or even, in the surreal exaggeration, Monty Python: the magnificently awful psychotic Mam, with her red line in the bath above which no water was ever to rise, is perhaps the most memorable character, but Mrs Pritchard-Evans, warm-hearted witch, kleptomaniac, mother manqué, comes close. And I have to confess to being rather guiltily fond of the female monster Kerridwins as she pushes our poor hero into the cauldron...
The best character, though, is the main one: Morgan Llewelyn Padrig Arthur Caradoc Jones-Jones. Like Milton with Satan in Paradise Lost, our author, in seeking to justify the ways of woman to man, has been unable to hide her secret admiration for the enemy. Real pearls (such as the vicious yet funny description of the unsexy Pam - ‘what was she for?’ - and his reactions to the Mothers’ gropings) are put in Morgan’s mouth, and are so just and true the author’s intention that we should see this as satire is, well, laughable! Oink. So, painful though it is to admit, this book could be enjoyed by men too. Greatly and rib-ticklingly enjoyed. (Not by real men, of course, men who understand that a jolly good spanking, or a quick shagging, are all that a woman deserves, but by the watery sort being produced these days who waste time wondering what women think.)
I will confess the book isn’t feminist at all in the popular sense of the word. The advocates of female supremacy would frown mightily upon our author for allowing her protagonist to see the weaknesses of a society ruled by sexist women. The book attacks the pig, whether male or female. Granville does at least have the decency to blame Morgan’s mother who had ‘made his journey through life such an empty, yearning one...’ We shall not allow ourselves to be distracted, of course, by the sly comment about the mother ‘hating and/or fearing men - (and why? And why? What had happened in her past?)’.
If we can forget the foul subversive intention (equality, my twitching trotters! Whatever next!) we can admire the wit and imagination that informs every paragraph of this most original book. The invention is stunning. Even dogs and cats, let alone pigs, come across as memorable characters. Even potatoes have their say! Sometimes, just sometimes, the highly original humour wavers, and we get straight shoot-from-the-hip moralizing (Morgan’s question and the ultimate answer, for instance), but this is rare.
Finally, the language. Marvellous. There is hardly a boring sentence in the book, and certainly you will never spot a cliché. Just one example among many: Mrs Pritchard-Evans’ face ‘as round and lumpy as an old-fashioned suet pudding boiled in a bag in the copper along of the washing, with withered-up black currants for eyes and a chapel-prim little worm-in-the-rosebud mouth sucked in where she’d left all her teeth out for reasons of economy... pink rubber gloves flapped like displaced gills from the poachers’ pockets of her outsize-plus green tabard’. The Cold Comfort-ish farm, the kitchen, and the characters - all are presented with words that won’t even consider the possibility of dullness...
To see the complete review please click on the link below:
Link: Whispers of Wickedness (www.ookami.co.uk)
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