The Pig Did It, by Joseph Caldwell

One of the great pleasures of my job is picking the books that the library book groups will read for our Fall, Winter, and Summer sessions.  I review dozens of titles for each of those sessions to come up with three titles, and along the way I find books that I’d like to read myself, but that don’t fit our themes.  And occasionally one of those books turns out to be a gem like The Pig Did It.

The plot description doesn’t do justice to the book, but here goes anyway:  Aaron McCloud has come to Ireland to recuperate from a failed love affair.  (The fact that the young lady is one of Aaron’s students, is homely as dirt, and doesn’t know that Aaron has a crush on her isn’t important to Aaron’s deep sorrow.)  En route to his aunt’s house, his bus comes across an overturned truck carrying Lolly McKeever’s pigs, and Aaron involves himself in the recapture of the wayward animals.  Somehow he winds up with one of the pigs, much to the amusement of his aunt’s neighbors.

Aaron goes to his aunt’s house, and the pig goes with him.  While Aaron mourns his One True Love on the narrow beach below the house (barely surviving each trip), Aunt Kitty works on one of her immensely popular novels.  Kitty (who, despite the honorific, is actually only a couple of years older than Aaron) specializes in “correcting”  flawed 19th century novels to bring happier endings to Austen, Dickens, and the Brontes’ books.

And what does the pig do?  It digs up the skeleton of a handyman buried in Kitty’s backyard.  Kitty blames Lolly McKeever, who in turn blames a man names Kieran Sweeney, and he lays blame at Kitty’s door.  But try as he might, Aaron can’t convince any one of the three to call the police.  From there, the proceedings become increasingly comic, until the handyman’s hilarious wake and reburial brings the book to a close.

The pleasure of the story doesn’t lie so much in the plot (fun as it is) as in the rich and descriptive language Caldwell’s Irish characters use.  Aaron, who is eloquent only in his own mind, is unable to stem the flow of invective among the suspects, or even to defend himself from their casual insults.  Caldwell is also spot-on in his observations of human (especially male) behavior.  And one sentence ought to be remembered by any woman who has tried to understand a man: “She was less attractive that he remembered, but the man’s presence at her side suggested that she was even more desirable than he’d thought.”  Priceless.

The Pig Did It is the first entry in Caldwell’s Pig Trilogy.  It is followed by The Pig Comes to Dinner and The Pig Goes to Hog Heaven (October 2010).  If the second two live up to the promise of the first (and I’m waiting for Dinner), then anyone who loves comic stories and wonderful writing should seek this out.  I’m going to recommend it to my book group members.  I’m just sorry our reading is taking us in a different direction.

Check the WRL catalog for The Pig Did It