The out-there, off-centre tone of this book seems quite extraordinary until you remember that its author, having won what was then the Booker McConnell prize in 1972, castigated the company for its colonial past and proceeded to give his prize money to the Black Panther movement. Berger's uncompromising, unsentimental socialist views are like a cold shower for the mind, and Pig Earth, the first of a trilogy which chronicles the decline of peasant cultures in the twentieth century, is a remarkable book; set in a small village in the French Alps, it interweaves poetry with political essay in language as rich and complex, yet simple and direct, as the earth itself.
