Curing the Pig (Paperback)

and from an old Herefordshire proverb, You can’t educate pork.

The narrator questions the reader, asserts the story’s premiss that when only the ‘death-wielding aspect of the ravening pig was maintained’ rather than its regenerative state, The Goddess retreated’ paving the way for ‘one jealous Father God’ who, being soon found wanting, ensured ‘danger for this planet and all its sentient beings’. The same voice asserts ‘Balance must be restored’. And ‘The Pig is the anti-hero’. So far, so familiar? And is this narrative voice a descendent of a Star-Track voice-over?

Well, no –far from it … the words ‘Let us play’ becoming later, ‘Let us pray ..let us pry’, lead us into the main story and provide, indeed, a playful keynote, an omniscience which never settles into the portentous or ponderous suggesting that ludic is an apt description of this type of fiction. But the point is, this novel is very hard to categorise and that is one of its strengths. It is not entirely fantasy nor any other genre fiction. Nor an out and out satire although satirical it is. I detected touches of Stella Gibbons, Lewis Carroll, Jeanette Winterson, Mervyn Peake, Ian Sinclair, but possibly not consciously intended. Multiple allusions abound. It is a concoction of comeuppances and is bleakly, blackly hilarious (the fate of Mam and Dad). And thoroughly original.

Even before he gets transported to a darker place Morgan’s village and its inhabitants in the Welsh Marches are a parallel universe. Granville is concerned with the liminal; the slipping between worlds-similar territory to that inhabited by Phillip Pullman but much more laugh out loud. The people from the Welsh Marches ‘are neither one thing or the other. Unless they want to be both.’ Celtic mythology is foregrounded. Morgan is an aspiring novelist after being made redundant. Despite his hoggishness the fact that ‘his knowledge of watered down myth, legend and history was better than most’ gives added credibility to the wealth of references. And the central events take place on Halloween when Morgan eats the wrong mushrooms and falls into another dark place, ‘calling for his Mam all the way’. Morgan’s relationship with his Mam-indeed, all boys’ relationships with mothers, is a central tenet here-even when the mams are at their most ghastly and hag-like.