Woman into pig

BIZARRE physical transformations in literature are not 20th-century inventions pioneered by Kafka, but date back beyond Gogol to La Fontaine and Ovid, never mind generations of European folk fable and fairy tales. Marie Darrieussecq's archly clever, vaguely pornographic satire, Pig Tales - A Novel of Lust and Transformation (Faber, £9.99 in UK), is the story of a girl who becomes a pig. Or rather, she finds herself hovering between her increasingly plump human form and a pig state. "I know how much this story might upset people, how much distress and confusion it could cause," she begins. "I suspect that any publisher who agrees to take on this manuscript will be heading for trouble heading for prison, probably." She continues: "I must write this book without further delay, because if they find me in my present state, no one will listen to me or believe what I say.

Such is the intensity of her apologies that the reader is poised to be rather less shocked than either her heroine or Darrieussecq might be expecting or hoping. Initially the narrator resembles a coyly innocent and slightly less criminal version of Moll Flanders. After all, she is merely a poor young girl looking for work, who gives great massages. Personally she has a lot to offer, more and more as the story progresses. "At that point in my life, men in general had begun finding me marvellously elastic. I'd put on weight - four or five pounds, perhaps - ... Now I understand that this extra weight and the wonderful quality of my flesh must have been the very first symptoms."

By page five, our heroine, one of those women who are always pawed and exploited by men, is sitting drinking cocktails at the poolside of a local swimming club. Honore, her new male friend, is explaining how the wave machine works. "Honore was telling me that sharks were put in the pool for certain private receptions, and before the fresh water killed them, they had five minutes in which to snap up the slowest guests .

Then everyone would swim in the red water until the wee hours." Two questions immediately emerge: what kind of club is this? and secondly, what kind of book is this?

Meanwhile she continues becoming more and more wholesome, more and more fat: "My complexion was turning ruddy, and the customers gradually fell into barnyard ways with me, their new inclinations turned the massage table into a sort of hay-stack out in a field." Echoes of Moll Flanders give way to Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde.

Potted pork now makes her feel sick and she begins to be haunted by images of slaughter. "I tried to stand tip and was surprised to find my body buckling beneath me." In keeping with her physical transformation, the narrative becomes increasingly grotesque. Yet Darrieussecq is careful to win some sympathy for her beleaguered heroine, whose complacency is soon replaced by self-disgust. Conscious that her relationship with Honore is over, she buys a guinea pig and a small dog. "I was looking for a companion, someone to understand and comfort me, not exhibit me like a circus freak."

When her boyfriend finally throws her out, she takes to sleeping out under the oak trees. "I carefully avoided thinking about meat, about everything that might resemble sausage, blood, ham, offal." Later she happens upon a harassed woman trying to fold up a pushchair and pack it in her car while her baby looks on. Approached by our pig-heroine, the woman becomes hysterical. "I opened my mouth but managed to produce only a sort of grunt, the sight of me seemed to frighten the woman."

As the heroine becomes more desperate, her narrative becomes increasingly hilarious, in the sickest of ways. She meets up with a new boyfriend, Yvan, who seems normal enough, except that when the moon is full he turns into a wolf. This presents its difficulties, which are solved by staying in and ordering a pizza. "The pizza spurted up into the air. You couldn't tell the blood from the tomato sauce . . . After that we had dinner delivered regularly, every evening on the full moon. I ate the pizza. Yvan ate the pizza man.

The jacket claims French readers are buying this first novel at the rate of 2,000 copies a day. These days, it seems, you can become a literary cult if you find the right mix of offbeat sex and violence. Linda Coverdale's translation is snappily adroit, and most of Darrieussecq's barbed swipes at our rotten society are driven home. Looks like the silly season has arrived. Should there be a film version, Luc Besson will surely make it. Makes you wonder about the state of French fiction, though.