One thing becomes eminently apparent right from the very start of this book. That start is the narrative poem title simply, “The Pig.” There is not much about the narrative that is simple, however. The verse tells the story of a clever pig with a “massive brain” who is smart enough to figure out how planes flyand engines work. Beyond the utilitarian logic of rational thought, however, the pig is also blessed with the deeper levels of critical thought which make him capable of attaining an existential crisis over what it means to be a pig in a world run by humans. The answer, of course, is that he exists for the purpose of becoming meat:
“They want my bacon slice by slice
To sell at a tremendous price!
They want my tender juicy chops
To put in all the butcher’s shops.”
The beast referenced in the title of this poem is a pig, but by the end none but the most oblivious can maintain that the dirty beasts within it are anything other than the farmer and the butcher. (And, by extension, all those who eat of the pig from their ministrations.)
Although not through direct inquiry, every selection in this book of verse seems to implicitly make a demand upon the reader to identify the dirty beasts within it. More often than not, the answer turns out to be a human. For instance, in “The Porcupine” it is not the quilled animal that is presented as beastly, but the avaricious dentist who makes no attempt to disguise the pure joy he takes in the painful process of removing the animal’s sharp needles from the young girl narrator’s backside. Likewise, the metaphorical creature that turns out to be literal after all in the “The Tummy Beast” speaks in a manner that sounds terrifying, but with words that pale in comparison to the truly beastly way the narrator’s own mother addresses her son: “You horrid child!” and “that is why you’re always fat!”
And so it goes. The titular bovine of “The Cow” is a remarkable animal capable of flight whose fantastic feat is attempted to be undermined by a “quite horrid man” who journeys all the way from Afghanistan just the purpose of insulting her. All “The Ant-Eater” wants to do is find the food which has given the creature its name, but the selfishness of a spoiled dirty little beast of a boy named Roy winds up sacrificing not just his own life, but that of an Aunt who just so happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. Time and again, in a myriad number of ways, the stories told of creatures ranging from crocodiles to scorpions in this book reveal that the dirtiest beasts among us are inevitably the two-legged kind who look just like reader.
