Johanna StoberockRecensioni

*Spoiler below*
Six pigs live on an island and eat all of the world’s garbage that floats in from the sea. They live in a pen and are fed by four children who bring the garbage from the shore to the pen. They can eat anything the world throws away – glass, toasters, plastic, radioactive waste – anything.

The children are tormented by the adults on the island. They live in a small hut while the adults live in a villa up the hill. When the adults get bored, they hunt the children. If captured, the children are forced to clean the villa and are teased and reviled by the adults.

One day a boy in a barrel washes onto the shore. The children must decide if this boy is more garbage and if he should be fed to the pigs. He looks just like the twin of one of the girls. He does not understand the island, the requirement to feed the pigs, the danger of the sea water, or the social order. Rather than try to learn, he is haughty and disdainful. When the adults capture the children in a net, they huddle away from this boy so that he is the one they take to their villa. While made a slave at first, the boy later gains the respect of the adults.

Meanwhile, a man also arrives on the island, brought in from a shipwreck. He laments the loss of his home and family, desiring to return to them. He becomes a father figure to the four children and tries to protect them. One night he goes to the villa to request help from the adults. Rather than aid him, they torture him and gouge his eyes out.

Now that the boy has been entrenched with the adults, he suggests that they kill and eat one of the pigs. After this, they still want more and decide to go after the children next. The children, seeing their potential fate, capture the boy in the villa and take him back with them.

Now that one of the pigs is gone and the others are in grief, the garbage begins to pile up on the island. The adults venture down to the hut to hunt for the children, intent on making them clean the island and then killing one or more of them. The children outsmart them, though, and toss the adults into the pen for the pigs swallow them.

With the evil adults gone, the sky clears and the children see that they may escape they island by walking on old floating refrigerators. The man encourages them to go while he stays behind to look after the pigs.

There are many themes in this allegory to explore. Sight and its usefulness if one refuses to see. What garbage is. What the value of human life is when acting inhumane. Responsibility to the environment and keeping social order. Human suffering and redemption. The ways in which things never really disappear.

Weird little book with a Lord of the Flies vibe. Well written and enjoyable but the ending was not what I expected (or hoped for). Loved the descriptions of what was considered "garbage". Memorable.

This novel is consistently well-written and imaginative but there was something missing for me. I think the missing something was “humanity.” Even an allegory, or maybe especially and allegory, needs to keep a connection with human feeling. I’m trying to think of an example now of what I mean and what came to mind was the story of Boxer the horse in Animal Farm. Every time I get to Boxer’s death in Animal Farm, I cry. An allegorical story doesn’t need to make me cry, but I guess I do want the allegory to work not just on a symbolic level, but also on a felt level. The author’s decision here to make the child protagonists devoid of emotion—they don’t even seem to feel physical pain appropriately—left me distanced from the story, and disinterested in its allegorical implications.

Pigs, a new book by Johanna Stoberock, is surely intended to be considered in relation to that other book about feral children on an island with pigs. There are four children on the island with six pigs and all the trash of the world floating ashore day after day after day. There are feckless, bored adults who entertain themselves by hunting the children to capture them and make them clean. There is one rule, every bit of trash is fed to the pigs. So what happens when the cuurent delivers another child and later another adult?

I thought the differences between Pigs and “The Lord of the Flies” are most interesting. The boys in Golding’s book resist work and want to play. These kids work hard. In Golding’s book, Piggy’s glasses are broken when he is beaten up. Here Luisa struggles with myopia all the time until a pair of glasses was ashore and she sees what she is missing for the first time. However, even though no one knows about the glasses, after enjoying with wonder the beauty she has never seen, Luisa throws the glasses to the pigs herself. That sacrifice makes her more implacable when the trash delivers Eddie, who is believed to be her twin. In Golding’s book, the adults represent rescue and in Pig, the adults are the worst danger.

Pigs left me puzzled. I know it would be great for a book group because I talked about it repeatedly. It is deeply strange and Stoberock has no interest in making it easy for you. This is a show book, you infer the rules of the road and there is no effort to explain what the children do not know. Their knowledge is yours, but nothing else. So, since they don’t know why they are the world’s trash cleaners or why the adults are all inhuman, and neither do we.

Pigs will be released on October 1st. I received an e-galley from the publishers through Edelweiss.

Pigs at Red Hen Press
Johanna Stoberock author site

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