I haven't actually read all that much John Berger, but I've long felt an affinity for him that I have a hard time explaining. Before Pig Earth, I'd read Corker's Freedom, which I adored, and G. and To the Wedding, both of which left me a little cold. And yet I maintained my love for Berger. I'd also read what believe is an excerpt from Here is Where We Meet that appeared in the New Yorker. It's years since I read it, but I remember being floored by it. The book wasn't published until a few years after the New Yorker piece, but I was thrilled when I realized there was a whole book. I started it, but abandoned it. I should probably go back and try again. As I try to figure out the order of all this, I'm a little stunned. The New Yorker piece was published in 2001, so that's probably when I read it. I had a subscription in those days. According to my Goodreads record-keeping, I read To the Wedding in 2005, Corker's Freedom in 2006, and G. in 2008. Was I maintaining my love for John Berger for all those years based on the New Yorker piece alone, until 2006 when I read Corker's Freedom? I suppose that's possible. I'm fairly certain I've also read one or two essays of his, though I don't remember any specifics, and I haven't read his most famous non-fiction work (certainly his most famous work of any genre in fact), Ways of Seeing. In any case, my love for Berger lasted, despite having read little and not even having liked all I read. It must also have been influenced by what I knew about him -- his politics, his principles, his adopted life in a peasant community in the French Alps.
The Into Their Labours trilogy is Berger's record of peasant life as it becomes increasingly rare and draws near its likely end. Pig Earth documents that life in vignettes and poems, describing the cycle of the seasons, the birthing and slaughtering of animals, the making of hay and gnôle, the departure of young men from the countryside to war and to the city. He writes with tenderness and affection about this life, but he doesn't glorify it. Hardship and untimely death are characteristic of the peasant experience, as the book makes clear. The last vignette in Pig Earth brought me right back to the New Yorker piece that I barely remember (and is the reason I decided I need to revisit Here is Where We Meet). The living narrator has a series of encounters with a recently-dead former lover. He follows her and finds a place in the wood where the dead have come together to build her a house. It's told in the most natural way, just like the narrator in the New Yorker piece who runs into his dead mother in Lisbon and has a conversation with her. The living do converse with the dead, and Berger turns that into real conversation. There is no element of the supernatural, these aren't even quite ghosts. They are the dead with whom the living continue to have a relationship that death only partly interrupts.
