Hamming it up in a comic Irish novel

FICTION

Escapee from a livestock truck. Unearther of a corpse. Catalyst for love.

And now, in a new adventure, beholder of ghosts.

It's a porcine party in "The Pig Comes to Dinner," novelist and playwright Joseph Caldwell's sequel to "The Pig Did It" and the second volume in his projected Pig Trilogy set in County Kerry, Ireland.

As this installment begins, novelist Kitty McCloud has married longtime familial enemy Kieran Sweeney and has bought Castle Kissane with the profits from her reworkings of classic novels. (In her version of "Jane Eyre," for example, it's Rochester, not his crazy wife, who hurls himself from the roof; the crazy wife then befriends Jane). Meanwhile, Kitty's nephew, Aaron McCloud, who's only two years younger than his aunt, weds swineherd Lolly McKeever, and they take the pig to Castle Kissane as a wedding gift.

But there's commotion at the castle. Two centuries ago, an English noble, Lord Shaftoe, was the target of a plot in which Irish rebels were believed to have planted gunpowder in the place. From the crowd, Shaftoe selected two teenagers, a boy and a girl, and declared that he'd have them hanged the next day unless the whereabouts of the gunpowder was revealed.

It wasn't, they were, and Shaftoe decamped to Australia. Now, alerted by the pig, Kitty and Kieran begin seeing the ghosts of the two martyred youths. As if that's not enough, a descendant of Lord Shaftoe shows up and claims to be the rightful owner of Castle Kissane.

The reader will marvel at Caldwell's inventive plotting, his command of the language and his easy transition from Irish humor to Irish angst, as in these two passages:

• "The Seer was helping herself to more Tullamore Dew."

• "The sea was enraged and had persuaded the sky to join in its frenzy. The seething waves broke over the land, sending walls of water down upon the defenseless countryside; the clouds, rent by lightning and clamoring with thunder, had opened wide and emptied their full allowance of rain without discipline on the hills and steeples, the cottages, and, perforce, the castles. The water seemed to be responding to more than a gravitational pull; more than merely falling, it was hurling itself, as if shot from the exploding clouds that were doing battle among themselves for domination of the sky."

Though tinged with the tragic -- it wouldn't be Irish if it were not -- "The Pig Comes to Dinner," like its predecessor, is essentially a comic novel; Kitty -- admirable, annoying Kitty -- is a particularly memorable character.

And then there's the pig, the peeing, squealing, irresistible pig. Other pigs have distinguished themselves in the pages of fiction, but this sow is something special, a perceptive porker whose loyal friendship with a cow leads to one scene that approaches slapstick.

Funny enough to have Guy Fawkes rolling with laughter in the afterlife (be it on a cloud or a spit), "The Pig Comes to Dinner" is a comic triumph as well as a touching remembrance of Ireland's bloody past. Caldwell is to be commended for casting this pearl -- complete with swine -- before an appreciative world. Contact Jay Strafford at (804)
649-6698 or .