Piggy

Piggy (Big in the original Dutch) by Mireille Geus is Like Mark Haddon’s The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, it is told in the first person by an autistic child. Here that child is Lizzy Bekell, a girl of about twelve who lives alone with her mother and attends a special school. Like Christopher in the recent novel, The Curious Incident, Lizzy is faced with events that challenge her to overcome the closed, internal world of autism. And both Lizzy and Christopher somehow manage to crawl out and respond in ways that are appropriate, courageous and empowering. But whereas The Curious Incident has an element of humor, there is nothing to laugh at in Lizzy’s tale. The oddity of Christopher’s take on his surroundings and his responses make us laugh and in a way set us apart from him. We know he is different and we find his behavior amusing, as we are meant to. But there’s something about Lizzy’s behavior that strikes the reader as familiar, like an exaggerated version of our own fears, and even her strangeness seems like a reasonable response to a threatening world.

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