Last month, the British author, Alexander McCall Smith, was awarded the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse prize, the United Kingdom's top award for comic fiction. The prize includes a jeroboam of champagne, 52 Everyman editions of P.G. Wodehouse's novels and a Gloucestershire Old Spot pig. The gift of the pig is a tribute to P.G. Wodehouse, who created that unmatchable sow, the Empress of Blandings. McCall Smith says that he is happy on getting the prize, which he has described as "well balanced" in terms of the three composite elements. But I am sure he loves the pig part of the prize the most.
The Empress of Blandings created history in the decades spanning the 1910s to the 1970s by repeatedly winning prizes in the "Fat Pigs" category in the Shropshire Agricultural Show in Wodehouse's "Blandings Castle" series. After that, pigs have made a comeback in recent novels, notably in those of Margaret Atwood and McCall Smith. But unlike the Empress, who just eats and farts, the pigs in Atwood and McCall Smith are intelligent.
In Atwood's dystopic Oryx and Crake trilogy, genetic scientists breed pigoons in the laboratory. Pigoons are pigs implanted with human stem cells so that they grow hearts, livers and kidneys, which can be transplanted into human beings when their organs fail. When an epidemic sweeps over the world to leave it ravaged, the escaped pigoons - growing more and more sentient, and so, clever, cunning and violent - run amok. They are on the verge of becoming villainous when they begin to show another human attribute, kindness. It starts off as the urge to save their babies from becoming pork chops and then expands to include all helpless beings, even their arch-enemy, man. Atwood imagines a future where pigoons may be worshipped as one of the creatures which prevented the world from fizzing out. Memory transforms them into winged beings, like angels, who rescue a besieged people.
In Dream Angus, McCall Smith retells the myth of the Celtic god of dreams, Angus. The mythic narrative alternates with stories in modern settings, which speak of the secret ministrations of Angus continuing in our lives. In the myth, pigs are gentle animals, living in peace, till they are driven out of their homes by marauding hounds. Angus takes them in. Then people start killing pigs for food and they have to move out again. Angus watches them troop out. He is unable to protect them.
The related modern story is called, "Is there a place for pigs there?" It is set in a research centre where pigs are bred to donate tissue to human beings - both Atwood and McCall Smith seem to be getting at the cruelty with which pigs are treated in laboratories, where their bodies are punctured, burnt, cut and genetically modified for experiments in human diseases. The world, clearly, is no place for pigs. It is also no place for the unambitious and the sympathetic, like Pig Twenty's young keeper, who is laughed at as an idiot by the clever scientists at the centre. The boy feels for Pig Twenty, who too feels his keeper in his skin, like an itch. When the time comes for Pig Twenty to be killed, the boy takes him away, across fields, to his home. But Pig Twenty has to be returned - he is a bio-hazard. The boy, for all his gentleness, is unable to protect him.
The boy finds a commonality with the pig that comes from the understanding that he and the animal are alike in their vulnerability to hurt. His kindness is ineffectual, as it so often is in the real world. But the boy receives the benediction of Angus, who, as the dream-maker, is also the creative artist.
All this makes it particularly apt that McCall Smith should get the Gloucestershire Old Spot pig. He has shown his approval by saying, "I like pigs - I used to have a small pig farm, 20 pigs, until we realised it was a good way of losing money. I'm very pro-pig".
