Pig Earth

"So he moves to Haute-Savoie in the Alps to write the Into the Labours trilogy. It’s often presented as being a trilogy of novels, but each of the books is divided up into short stories. Over the three of them, there’s an overarching narrative that’s like Zola’s Rougon-Macquart series, in that it follows interconnected families through several generations and traces what’s happening to them. The first book, Pig Earth is largely about stories from the local area. In the archive you see him picking them up and a lot of the time they’re just anecdotes. Stories that go around communities are often total hearsay, but can have a quality of fable to them. He thinks the relationship between the living and the dead is very important to peasant culture: having a very different attitude to history than one has in the city. The first book is specifically about the area around where he is living in the Alps; the second is about the transition between the two states; the last one is about when all of the descendants of these families have settled firmly in the city, it’s an urban novel. It’s the one that works least well. The question of writing about people who are very different to you is a broader one of any writing that isn’t a novelist writing about themselves. It’s something he wrestles with. The question of whether or not it succeeded is ultimately answerable only by reading the book and deciding for yourself. But somewhere he really grapples with it is a TV documentary about Zola’s Germinal he made in ’72. It bridged the gap between A Fortunate Man and Pig Earth . In it, he talks about the experience of people who spend a lot of their lives in the ground mining coal, and uses a nineteenth-century novel to do it. It’s for the Open University, and it’s being broadcast in a Britain where mining is still then a huge source of employment. Inevitably, he is a man from a certain background trying to write about people from a different background. It raises a much broader question about art and literature and representation and politics in general. What gives you the right to narrate? How do you possibly speak for someone else’s experience? “For Berger, rather than be an isolated novelist, he wanted to be a story-teller, to be a conduit through which other people’s stories travel.” I think it’s the ability to think yourself into another person’s position and I think it’s, in Berger’s case, what he would describe not just as empathy but a sense of solidarity. Even if you don’t have the same political views as Berger, I still think this category of solidarity is important, and is one of the things you can draw from his work. It’s the story-teller thing."