I have a soft spot for Hog. He’s one of my favourite characters, though he and Piper are already dead by the time this book starts and, as with Eamon, known only by the stories their survivors tell.
Hog deepens the Father/Son theme. We don’t need to be related to people to form strong bonds and we can be related and never be close. Bonds can be formed through camaraderie and shared struggles, even a sham game of cantankerousness. We really are an adorable bunch of dipshits.
Many indigenous cultures raise children communally. ‘It takes a village to raise a child.’ Not the locked doors and closed curtains of our parenting efforts today. The staring into each other’s supermarket trolleys to see what crap we feed our children (because we don’t have the time to do better) and because advertising campaigns and supermarket aisles are designed to make buying food a point of conflict between parent and child, and an opportunity for passersby to be judgemental. We are better than this. That’s a core message of Eat My Shadow. We are better than this But we live in a system that squeezes us into unnatural shapes.
Father had loved Hog, we don’t realise early on the depth of the connection he’d had with the cantankerous old bugger. After he dies Father buries him with his killers. A regret that he returns to. Another of his wounds that festers and he never shares.
Image by Tibor Janosi Mozes from Pixabay
