Pork was Cris Freddi’s first book. The original edition was written in 1979, when he was 24, and published two years later to that favourite phrase of publishers: widespread critical acclaim.
Freddi followed this collection of short stories with his first novel, The Elder, published in 1983. Then a change of direction as he made himself into one of Britain’s leading sports historians (one of its top armchair sportsmen, as he put it). His landmark book on the England football team was followed by three editions of the Complete Book of the World Cup, universally recognised as the best ever history of the event. A prolific contributor to newspapers and magazines, notably the seminal football fanzine When Saturday Comes, he also wrote a number of sports books for Guinness Publishing.
In 1994, he found time to win BBC Wildlife magazine’s annual nature-writing competition, then returned to fiction in 2005 with another novel, Pelican Blood, based on birdwatching and murder (a natural pairing, he called it). Published in three different countries, it was made into a film in 2010.
Born in Reading of Italian parents, Cris Freddi has lived in London since 1977. He recently visited the wilds of Paraguay to research his latest novel. As in Pork, animals will feature. And birdwatching and murder.
San Francisco Chronicle
Animals are the characters in this strange but oddly captivating collection of stories. Freddi examines the lives of denizens of the forest, but he does so without patronizing cuteness or whimsey. In these 11 tales nature is randomly cruel, bloodshed and death are omnipresent. A stoat kills a crow and a family of badgers before being itself attacked by a huge pike which has demolished a shoal of roach; the killers finish each other off. Freddi’s remarkable achievement is to convey the personalities of the various creatures in an unsentimental, straightforward manner, through their speech and through the instinctive behaviour characteristic of each species. Although we never forget we are reading about animals, the stories take on other dimensions as well: one is a classic suspense mystery, another has the theme of a Greek tragedy, some are exciting adventure narratives…Freddi’s curious imagination, meticulous observation and empathetic insight make him an author to watch.
Pork, by Cris Freddi, is a very good book. So careful is Freddi’s eye in surveying his northern swatch of nature; so particular his words in describing its forests, soils, and mountains, all constitutions of weather and seasons, all sensate responses to growth, color, odors and decay; so content his mood with the laws that cause both life and death…Porkis not fantasy. It is deadly realistic…Half the skill and most of the entertainment of this book is that its characters are sharply drawn personalities. There’s Vim, a go-lucky little vole whose moments apart from a nagging wife are cherished as much as beer in a bar; Redge, an elderly bat with a cunning mind and the grace to grieve when his strategies kill…there’s a badger concerned that he not be blamed for crimes not his, a stoat of frightful dumb brutality, a wren-mother of the most selfless, desperate and sacrificial love. That this book is not oppressively morbid is its triumph…such humor, such tiny, sharply etched gestures of caring, of hope, of sweet premeditation, assure the reader that, though death may rule at its parameters, life after all is an opportunity, and each being has some say in how might be lived.
Washington Post
I found the Philistines Pooh and Piglet all-time bores, and as for The Wind in the Willows and Toad in his check suit lazing away the afternoon in his armchair – Yuk! And those dreadful bunnies in Watership Down. I’ll only say they are nothing but English schoolboys in fur costumes. All of which is cautionary. The book under consideration today is about animals who live in a small patch of English forest…The creatures in Pork do not wear clothes. Their lives are dangerous, and in many cases short. The world they inhabit is one of cruelty, hunger and death… You would not be able to say this is a bedtime book for the smalls of this world… Pork is a hedgehog. Scuttling and rolling through the forest, he encounters a squirrel named Reek, fights two evil badgers (thank you, Kenneth Grahame), and gets nothing for his pains. Cris Freddi, a talented and faintly menacing young writer, terrorized me with this story and even brought a drop of glycerine to the eye. There are two cannibals. A predatory old owl who traps younger ones, and a stoat who even ate his mother. This “Na” is so horrifying that you are pleased, as is the forest population, at his demise… Gob is a cuckoo raised by a busy little wren who thinks he is hers – a morality fable. Does it bother you that a white mouse is called Cheesewire and says to himself, “Well, Cheesy boy, this is where the funs starts.”? Then keep away. Vermin at play. On the other hand you’d be missing something. Something oddball but something wondrously strange.
Fascinating as someone else’s nightmare…The book of related tales defies analogy on several levels, first because it is neither a novel nor a collection of stories…The edgy, uncomfortable feeling this book gives one has a positive flip side in a weird spellbinding quality, much the same quality that forces drivers to examine squashed animals on the road as they cruise by. The chattiness of the characters, set off by their lurking murderousness, creeps up until the wary reader can trust no character. Manhattan is a picnic compared to the paranoia engendered in this forest. Freddi’s literary debut is wondrous in its own way, and affectingly terrifying, and above all, strange. Do not read it while eating dinner.
The English writer Cris Freddi has created a gallery of believable animal characters who, though they speak in the language of human beings, express themselves as wild creatures might do. The reader puts down the volume believing that he has seen the forest as the animals see it. These stories are cleverly imagined and beautifully realized…it is impossible not to admire the writer’s talent. Even readers immune to the allure of Watership Down and Jonathan Livingstone Seagull will be impressed by the skill reflected in these brilliant, unsentimental tales.
Those who are tired of those namby-pamby fairy tale animal stories with consistently unrealistic happy endings should sneak Cris Freddi’s new book into their home libraries…the first story of the collection is about a hedgehog called Pork: ‘It was still very cold and there was rain in the air when round Pork pushed his snout out from under the leaves. It was well into autumn and the leaves were wet, fresh-smelling, Pork frowned. Too soon, he said to himself. Waking up too soon with everything still all wet and cold. Very strange. He took a couple of steps forward, scratched at the damp forest floor and sniffed. Too soon. Too wet. He sniffed again and shambled off into the night.‘ Sounds like your typical animal story so far, doesn’t it? Then, WHAM! The conclusion of the story, after Pork’s curiosity has led him onto a paved road…Freddi is English, Oxford-educated, lives in London, And young. The jacket on the book tells nothing more of his background, but it should. One can’t help wondering what kind of childhood Freddi must have had to be able to write these stories. Perhaps if you had a big pot wherein you could melt together some Beatrix Potter and some Roald Dahl, with a little Alfred Hitchcock, you might brew up something similar to a Freddi story. Life and death. The survival of the fittest and the triumphs of the most cunning. The meek and the mild and the freaks of the world. In one story Freddi tells about an old owl who can no longer hunt for food so he becomes a cannibal. Another of the tales concerns some intricate interplay between an old bat and an old otter friend. Vengeance is the theme here, but it is no simple cut-and-dried human variety of an eye for an eye. It is a tale so full of complexities and shadings and symbols that college freshmen English classes could spend a big part of a semester digesting and dissecting it. Then there is the love-hate relationship between a “soft plump dormouse” and an old, partially paralyzed adder. She depends on him for protection and he depends on her for food. The tale ends logically, after Freddi weaves a thread of Oedipus tragedy into it, but it isn’t necessarily a predictable ending. Each of the stories stands alone, but since many of them occur in the same forest, some of the characters crop up in secondary tales of other characters. When that happens, it’s like recognizing an old friend. This book is easy reading but invites a lot of hard pondering. And it leaves one wondering about and looking forward to what this young writer will create next.
What a strange, interesting book this is. We see that these animals aren’t bedtime companions, but beings who kill – and not always for food…Pork plays with ways of narration, from simple adventure stories to a mystery tale. In “Redge,” an ageing bat meets an old friend Kayak the otter, and the two exchange banter in one of the funniest sections of the book. But even here, the writer tricks us, with the humor suddenly showing its deadly side. There’s plenty to wonder at here.
There continue to be writers who follow their own imaginative paths. Such a writer is Cris Freddi, young British author of Pork and Others, a flawlessly written collection of short stories in which forest animals are the only characters, often speaking to each other as eloquently as humans, while they struggle with the dangerous conditions of their world. We see through the eyes of these animals, and Freddi’s skill is such that we never doubt their reality, be they snakes or dormice, bats or otters, birds or deer. But at the same time, these characters aren’t animals at all. They are heroes, lovers, monsters and murderers, their battle with death so relentless and fraught with treachery that it transcends the mere struggle for survival. These characters fascinate, sometimes frighten, frequently compel. When Old Common, the hare, sees the hunting dogs are almost upon him, we feel his terror, his near despair: ‘For the first time he realised just how much his death meant to these dogs – and to their owner. Could they really hate him so much? For the first time, he had no plans, no strategy left. He’d tried everything, and yet here they were, coming over to end his life.‘ Some of the most powerful moments in the book are those in which animals, after polite conversation, are suddenly locked in a death struggle as one commences to make a victim of the other, sometimes out of hunger, sometimes out of sheer will. This shift from civilized comrade to predator has an eerie erotic feel. Sometimes the stories bewilder; sometimes they disturb. Frequently, they are exciting, wonderfully suspenseful, and always they enthrall. Their complexity defies the all too predictable probe for allegory. The work as a whole is darkly lustrous, beautifully written, rich. It is a collection of finely wrought stories, and Freddi’s imagination is so special and so powerful, his writing so clean and masterly that we are left quite impressed, quite satisfied, and wanting more of his work.