To write convincingly of peasants, not least if you once produced a book on Picasso, would seem as doomed a literary enterprise as creating Trotskyite love-lyrics. For no social figure has surely been glamourised and debunked in such fine proportion; the word can suggest the moral beefiness of an Adam Bede just as easily as it can evoke a surly cretin smeared in cow-shit. Pig Earth is a set of stories, poems and essays about French peasant life by a well-known English intellectual; and it's therefore obvious even before opening it that its chief problem will be that of the stance it assumes towards its own subject-matter.

It's a relief to learn as early as page 7 that John Berger does actually live in a peasant community and to some extent shares its working life; but the real evidence that the book isn't the fruit of research in the...