Book review: Pyg: The Memoirs of a Learned Pig

READER, do not suspend disbelief. Mince it instead, to pass through a sausage machine, the better to swallow intact the spool of sophisticated verbiage contained within the hard covers of this soft-bellied autobiography, “the memoirs” of a (charmingly) erudite pig.

This pig’s vocabulary would flummox most librarians, not to mention kids with A-stars to their names. This is an Oxbridge pig; you might dub him an oinktellectual, a rational, shrewd observer of flawed humanity. Toby composes well-burnished sentences in mildly archaic prose, as befits the era of their making, the first decade of the 19th century.

Since nothing within its contents could be as improbable as the existence of this memoir in itself, (for these are indeed the unvarnished bon mots of Toby unaided, direct from the snout, not some ghosted, ersatz attempt at piggery-jokery), it would be pointless to mock the remarkable feats of accomplishment, both literary and otherwise, referred to within its pages.

As the book’s editor, Russell Potter (rhymes with trotter), points out perceptively in his foreword: “This narrative requires no suspension of our ordinary notions of reality – only a realisation of how vast, indeed, that reality may be.”

PYG charts Toby’s eventful journey from imminent death to immortality, first through the piglet years, then befriended by kindly Sam Nicholson, a farmboy, and on to the fattening times, being sold as a prizewinning specimen at market, and thence to slaughter.

With Sam’s assistance, exceeded only by his devotion, Toby escapes and together they chance upon the estate of Silas Bisset, whose home and lands have been given over to the wellbeing of a gathering of horses, dogs and cats, finches and mice, all “in perfect Harmony”. Mr Bisset, the sole human being (and vegetarian to boot), commands this menagerie by kindness, duly rewarding them for their obedience. But upon Toby he lays a further, extreme demand.

“Our routine which began that Day, never varied,” Toby explains. “Mr Bisset would point to a card upon which was written a letter or number. He would then Name the card …” Toby, desperately at pains to explain the method by which Silas Bisset taught him to “read”, makes little sense of it. Two full pages are devoted to reader-confusion. The mechanistic means by which he “reads”, and by which he is able to acquire the rudiments of a stage act as “the wonderful Sapient Pig”, are never transparent. Thus Toby “performs” but without understanding. It is Sam who clandestinely teaches Toby to read with some grasp of meaning, and thereby to stir his curiosity, his hunger for self-improvement

The main body of the memoir becomes a miscellany of events and destinations, revealing the wonderful sapient pig touring through Lancashire, where his newly acquired grasp of language – telling the time, answering questions from the audience – causes gasps. After triumphing in Liverpool, having bestowed upon him “the Liberty of the Town”, Bisset takes Toby (with Sam in attendance) to an amphitheatre in Dublin. “I feel nothing within my heart but sort of cold, containing darkness,” Toby discloses. It is an ill portent.

Ireland brings trauma. Later, in Belfast (though this is disputed in the book’s appendix, written by Potter), Bisset is beaten up by a policeman, and Toby is traumatised by Sam’s being left in Dublin. The book’s most dramatic culmination occurs in Chester a short time later, after which, with Sam as his “handler”-cum-companion, the story proliferates into a roll call of Toby’s achievements, his accrual of learned admirers (Dr Johnson to the fore), his studies at Oxford University and his showdown with an impostor to gain the undisputed title of pig cum laude – paradoxically, not by answering a question, but by asking one.

“What was I? A freak of nature?” he reflects. “But if I were, might not Sir Isaac Newton, or Galileo, or Shakespeare be similarly regarded … ?” This boastful comparison touches the nub of the book’s fascination: Toby shines light on our human qualities, lending due distance to how we might view them: our capacity for loyalty, friendship, all the deadly sins, curiosity, fear of death, vulnerability and a yearning for recognition, whatever our worth. It is the most ordinary of tales, made extraordinary not by the “freakishness” of its “author” but by the humanity. Which is what captivates and touches, and makes the book worth reading.

• PYG: THE Memoirs of a Learned Pig, edited by Russell Potter, Canongate, 273pp, £12.99