Danny is in his mid-teens, probably 15 or 16, and lives with his parents and slobbish elder brother Richard in some unspecified run-down edge-of-town location. His grandmother and grandfather live nearby, or at least they do until the first couple of pages of the books, wherein Granny ups and dies, leaving Grandad all alone in the house. Not all alone in the garden, though, as the couple are the improbable custodians of a fucking enormous pig.
Grandad is judged unable to cope on his own in the house (not to mention incapable of heavy-duty pig management) and is shunted off to an old folks' home where Danny visits him regularly (no-one else seems to bother much). Danny also volunteers to look after the pig, which basically involves boiling up malodorous vats of vegetable leftovers and redistributing pigshit across the vegetable patch.
Danny is a considerate and helpful boy, but he also has some ulterior motives for wanting to spend time over at his grandparents' old place. Firstly it provides a respite from his family: Mum, brother Richard but also his Dad, intermittently drunk and punchy and permanently grouchy from working on the night shift. Secondly Danny has struck up a fledgling relationship with Surinder, an Asian girl from his school whose family run a local mini-mart, and is keen to get her alone in an undisturbed location so he can get to know her on a deep and personal level, and then get her knickers off.
This is all peachy for a while but no matter how much fun Danny, Surinder and the pig are having, there are certain realities that must be faced up to. Firstly, Danny's grandparents didn't own the house so at some point the council are going to want it back, either to rent out to someone else or to sell off to the group of property developers who are sniffing around the area. Secondly, pigs need care and maintenance and occasionally get sick and need veterinary attention. Thirdly, certain elements of the community aren't very happy about having Asians in their midst and certainly wouldn't be very happy about discovering fraternising of this sort going on.
So, inevitably, things come to a head and Danny and Surinder are left to contemplate their futures, which are probably going to be lived separately. As for the pig, well, I don't want to ruin it for you, but chances are the pig doesn't have a future, guys.
So we're in That Last Golden Summer territory, with just a bit of quirky weirdness and uneasiness on the side. Danny and Surinder's relationship is sweetly convincing, comprising, as most teenage relationships do, equal parts a) mooching around together not saying anything b) bickering and c) fucking. That said, once the initial plot elements have been put in place - the family, the pig, Surinder, the cottage - the plot meanders a bit until the slightly low-key All Is Revealed moment, whereupon the book pretty much ends.
The novel this most reminded me of was Ian McEwan's The Cement Garden: adolescent kids alone in a house, some slightly transgressive sexy sexy times, things decaying ripely around the central characters until eventually someone notices and All Is Revealed. There are some elements of Peter Benson's The Levels as well: local boy meets slightly exotic non-local girl, she grants him access to her chamber of magical secrets for a glorious season before buggering off to bigger and better things leaving him to stay.....local.
It's perfectly good in its unstartling way, and won all sorts of First Novel awards when it was published in 1994, most notably the Betty Trask Award and The Authors Club First Novel Award, both of which The Levels also won in 1987. Other Betty Trask Award winners on this list are The Hunter, The Dark Room and My Summer Of Love.
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