There is no longer an English peasantry. John Berger lives and works in a French peasant community and Pig Earth is the first fruits of his labours there. It is a very striking book indeed, a collection of compelling stories portraying, without literary sentimentality or sociological heavy-handedness, the world that his neighbours inhabit. Discovering an entry point into their experience through his own established role as a story teller, Berger moulds his narrative round gossip and anecdotes from the village to produce a work that can legitimately lay claim to the privileges of both fiction and ethnography. He brackets these stories between analytical accounts of peasant "survival culture", a culture which, for the first time, faces the possibility of extinction and replacement, not by affluence, but by wage-slavery.

John Ryle, "Catching Up, Fiction: 'Pig Earth'," in The Times Literary Supplement (© Times Newspapers Ltd. (London) 1979; reproduced from The Times...