Questions for Catherine Fox on the novel Angels and Men by Kiyoka Yamagami, Takahiro Kiya, Mai Enomoto, Tomoko Takeda, Yuko Kato, Shunsuke Hiratsuka, Tomoko Masuda, Kate Morris, Zoe Koh, Adriana Hristova, Erika Yamauchi, Jun Ohashi, and Wakana Arai.
Part 2

Tokyo University, 25 June 2004

First of all, many thanks for your generous and detailed response to our previous interview. Your answers were very fluent and informative, though there seemed an (almost) general agreement that we’d like to know more about the relationship between feminism and your Christian faith, and how this plays out in the novel Angels and Men. Do you agree with the view ‘equal but different’ for male and female social roles? What is the difference between Christian feminism and other types of feminism?

The first thing to say is that I didn’t have a feminist or church agenda I was trying to give voice to in the novel. The main imperative was having a story to tell, so any bog theories are always played out in the action, through the characters.

Historically the church has been (and remains) a patriarchal organisation, although the gospel message itself is extraordinarily liberating for oppressed groups. The oppressive passages in the epistles (mainly Paul’s) need to be held in tension with the underlying message. The heart of it is interpretation. In Angels and Men the clashes and agreements between feminism and Christianity are explored as they have an impact on the experience of the main character.

Equal but different? Clearly there are fundamental biological differences between men and women, but it the extent to which they ought to dictate social roles is an open question. Biology isn’t everything. I may find I have more in common with a man from a similar background and education than with a woman whose experience has been different from my own. In the church, I can’t see any theological reason for differentiating between men’s and women’s roles. So ‘yes’ to women bishops, for heavens sake.

Difficult to say if there’s such a thing as ‘Christian feminism’. A form of feminism that excluded the possibility of a male messiah figure would cease to be distinctively Christian, obviously.

Although Mara is described as ‘prickly and difficult’, her likeability is not in doubt. You talk about inventing Andrew to make Mara seem more sympathetic. Is there a danger that she then becomes too likeable, and therefore unbalanced for the reader in the other direction?

A skilful writer can seduce you into sympathising with a complete monster. I remember reading John Lancaster’s The Debt to Pleasure, and although the protagonist is a raging egomaniac and indeed a serial killer, it wasn’t till the closing pages that I was finally alienated from him. This is what fiction can do. It invites you into the head of the character to share their experience. This is especially true of first person narratives, but also of books where the viewpoint is closely tied to the protagonist. If you step back you can see that the character is objectionable, but somehow while you are reading, you are still on their side. My aim is to get the reader to understand, and therefore to care. In my next two novels you get to see Mara from the viewpoint of two other very different protagonists, and this corrects the impression of the first book, I think. And incidentally, not all my readers find her sympathetic.

There’s a striking resemblance between Mara and the early-Christian figure Hildegard Von Bingen (as described in the case-study in Oliver Sacks, The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat). As well as having visions of angels brought on by migraines, Hildegard was also a writer with liberal views about sex. Is Mara a modern religious icon, a twentieth-century Hildegard?

Hildegard of Bingen was committed to the life of a religious community and that was the context for her actions and achievements. I think Mara is too self-absorbed and isolated to function as a 20th C Hildegard.

You say that the angels in the novel are supposed to create a sense of ‘eerie otherness’. Could you explain what you mean in more detail?

I think I mean that I was conscious as I was planning the novel that its geographical and political scope was very limited, and that I was in danger of writing a small domestic piece about the lives of a tiny group. I wanted to make the book bigger than that. It occurred to me that what I had at my disposal was the whole of the Christian tradition. After struggling to get the first chapter right, at some stage (though I can’t now remember when or how — possibly I’d read a review of the film Wings of Desire) an image came to my mind of angels over the city of Durham. Suddenly this created an extra tier of action which created the depth and resonance I was looking for. Initially there was a lot more of this writing in the book, but it got cut.

Was the ending of Angels and Men surprising to you? Or did you always aim, even before you started writing, for the book to end this way?

I always saw it ending with her father waiting for her, with echoes of the parable of the prodigal son.

Looking back at the novel now, how do you feel about the ending?

I think it ends well, though not tidily. Judging by the number of people who have asked me “What was in the letter?” it was more of a cliff hanger than I’d intended it to be. You get a sense, while writing, (or perhaps I should say that I do), of the whole thing moving inevitably towards the only right fitting conclusion, and when you get there, you know it. Then you sit back and say,That’s it. I’ve done it.

You mention the sexual revolution destroying a common ethic which was often exploited by previous generations of writers. If this is also true in other fields of behaviour, so that the common ethic is much weaker than it once was, is it still possible to write novels which can be accepted by a ‘wide range of people’?

Well, we have the phenomenon of the bestseller, so either it is possible to write novels accepted by a wide range of people, or else people don’t read novels simply to have their own world view affirmed, but for a variety of other reasons. I think there is still a shared sense of what constitutes a good way of living, and what is by contrast cruel, or shallow, or self-serving. Maybe we like to read about a world in which these values are upheld? But many great novels have the satirical function of challenging prevailing views and attacking the status quo.

In both the novel and your replies to our earlier questions, you allude to classical works of English literature. Do you have any model English writers in your mind when you’re writing?

I think it is inevitably true that writers are to some extent shaped by what they read. I would love to write a novel as good as, say, Penelope Fitzgerald’s novels, but it isn’t true to say I model myself on her.

Your depiction of Mara is in some ways an attack on society, and its attitudes to religion and gender-roles. If you could change society, how would you do it?

At the heart of it all for me is grace, the undeserved kindness and generosity of God. Any lasting change of society I can envisage would have to spring from that — a personal acknowledgement in gratitude, which then plays out in generosity towards others. Plus I would have women bishops.

The novel described the process of Mara’s recovery from depression and isolation. What do you think of the therapeutic value of writing stories?

There’s no doubt that many people are helped by writing down some of their traumatic experiences, maybe in the form of stories. This is a separate process from writing a novel, though, which is a public form, not private therapy. It’s possible as a writer to work through various issues while writing, but that is probably a by-product. If you set out to lay a ghost by writing a novel, it may or may not end up being a good book.

Do you see a clear connection between commercial success and reader approval? How important is it for a writer to be commercially successful?

Writing a novel pre-supposes an audience. It is not a private journal. The crude measure of success is sales, yes. If the readers approve of me, why aren’t they buying my novels? Commercial success is, in theory, less important than artistic integrity. So what we want is critical acclaim and obscene wealth. There is an unkind natural law which states that it is the people most absurdly sensitive to criticism who feel the most driven to write and put their stuff out there where it can be attacked. I don’t know why we bother, really.

Questions for Catherine Fox on the novel Angels and Men by Kiyoka Yamagami, Takahiro Kiya, Mai Enomoto, Tomoko Takeda, Yuko Kato, Shunsuke Hiratsuka, Tomoko Masuda, Kate Morris, Zoe Koh, Adriana Hristova, Erika Yamauchi

Tokyo University, 3 June 2004

Was there someone or something in particular that motivated you to write Angels and Men?

I have wanted to write novels for as long as I can remember. The first ideas for Angels and Men came to me in 1986 when I was reading 17th C Quaker tracts and investigating the phenomenon of religious fanaticism. The other motivation was my love affair with the city of Durham. It struck me that there was a gap in the market, and nobody had done a kind of Brideshead Revisited about student life there.

When writing this novel, did you have a primary reader-group in mind? Did you expect the readers to be mainly female? And, with the readers in mind, did you hesitate to concentrate so specifically on religion for fear of turning readers away?

In the first instance I was writing for myself with total 100% commitment — the way first novels often are. I had to decide fairly early on, however, how to pitch the style. I wanted to make it accessible to as wide a range of readers as possible. I wanted it to be enjoyed by professors of Theology and by my childminder. This meant that I ruled out anything too experimental in style, although I believe the book engages with important ideas. I hope it can be read a different levels, both as an exploration of fanaticism and salvation, but also as a cracking good read. I suppose I’m still a bit surprised that so many men appear to enjoy it, though I wasn’t trying to write a ‘women’s book’.

I don’t think readers are necessarily turned off by religion if it’s handled well. My image of a novel is low budget virtual reality. It offers readers the chance to experience a different world for the space of however many hours or days it takes to read the book. My inspiration was the orthodox Jewish writer Chaim Potok, whose novels are a window into the world of Judaism.

In Angels and Men, the male characters seem idealised. Why is that? And which one do you like best?

I think the men are bastards, actually, in their different ways. Both Rupert and Johnny are different takes on the cliche of the romantic hero, which was something I was exploring. Andrew is my favourite male character.

Do you think there is a distinction between Romance novels and serious novels? Which do you consider Angels and Men to be?

There’s a lot of snobbery about genre fiction, much of it undeserved. My intention in Angels and Men was to write serious contemporary fiction, though the book can be read at the level of a romantic yarn. The thing about genre fiction is that it has certain conventions, which I didn’t try to follow in Angels and Men. The romance myth is hugely dominant in our society. Despite all of us knowing its limitations, we still feel its influence, and it is one of the narrative frameworks we tend to impose on our own experience. I think the novel is an ideal literary form to examine the myth.

Did the characters develop during the writing of the novel, or were they all planned out in advance? Did they ever take on a life of their own?

Yes, the characters developed. My books are character- rather than plot-driven. The more you write and think about them, the more subtle and ‘real’ they become. They react to one another in unpredictable ways, and to the situations you place them in. The best example from Angels and Men is the character of Andrew. He wasn’t part of the original plot. I realised early on that there was a danger of Mara being too prickly and difficult for the reader, so I thought it would help her cause to put an even more unlikable character in the room next door. As the action developed he became more complex and interesting. I began to think there was a love interest there, so I kept trying to contrive a scene between him and Mara, but it kept not happening. I was halfway through the book before I wondered if he was gay.

Are you a painter? In this novel, you use painting to express Mara’s feelings. Why painting, and not music or poetry?

When I was 18 I had to choose between art college and university, so although I’m not a painter now, I was then, and was making use of that experience in my fiction. While I was writing the book I had a close friend who was a painter, and we used to exchange ideas. In fact, she was reading the novel chapter by chapter as I wrote it, so there may be some of her input in the pages.

We’re interested in the level of autobiography in the novel. How far do the events of the novel correspond to your own experience at University, with sects, with men? Are you Mara? And if the novel is not autobiographical in this way, do you have other models for the characters?

The bottom line is that my writing comes out of my own head, not out of somebody else’s, so to that extent it is the product of my own experience and reflection. Some of the broad contours are autobiographical — yes, I went to Durham; yes, the college with the theological college next door is unmistakably the one I attended; yes, I did a thesis on women and Quakerism; yes, I have firsthand experience of charismatic Christianity, though not as extreme or as unpleasant as Mara’s. No, I’m not Mara, thank God, though it might be fun to be that rude to people now and then. My characters aren’t modelled on real people. I will take little bits of people — their experience, anecdotes, hair, mannerisms, attitudes, speech etc — and use them as starting points. But the real thrill of writing traditional fiction is when this mish-mash of bits suddenly starts living and breathing as an utterly believable character.

The book displays various opinions towards homosexuality and feminism. Which opinion is closest to your own? Do you think of yourself as a feminist?

Most thinking women are feminists, in the sense that injustice and discrimination on gender grounds is always unacceptable. My feminism finds its expression within the context of my Christian faith and the two inform and inspire one another. The issue of homosexuality is highly contentious in the Anglican Church at the moment. This was true, though less urgently, when I was writing Angels and Men, which is why I have groups of theological students sitting in bars arguing about it. The character most closely expressing my views would be Johnny.

Love, sex and marriage – do all three have to go together?

No. In earlier generations of fiction-writing a lot of drama revolves around the characters’ struggles with sexual temptation/immorality. You could say that the sexual revolution removed at a stroke one of the richest seams a novelist could mine. If it’s OK to engage in sex outside marriage, and adultery is bad behaviour rather than ’sin’ — what is there left morally for the writer to get her teeth into? Tess of the D’Urbervilles couldn’t have been written in 2004. This is why I enjoy writing about religious belief — it’s one place where acute ethical and sexual anguish is still very much alive.

Have you ever witnessed a miracle? Or a spiritual visitation of any kind? Angels? Did you have any intention of converting your readers?

No, I’ve never witnessed a miracle, though I know otherwise sane normal people who claim they have. It’s an idea I can easily accommodate within my world view. Angels — no, only once in a dream. I don’t intend to convert my readers, so much as open a window onto the mysterious world of faith. Occasionally I read other people’s novels and get the feeling that they are on their own personal crusade. If the agenda of the writer is too obvious, then the fiction tends to be compromised. The novel doesn’t make a good vehicle for preaching.

The novel deals with many delicate issues, such as religion, feminism and homosexuality. Is there anything you would refrain from writing about, either by your own decision or persuaded by an editor?

No.

While writing, have you realised any limitations to your writing ability? What do you see as your weaknesses as a writer, and is there anything you have to conquer to improve your career?

Every time I write I come away with a sense of the gulf between what I intended and what I ended up with. My main weaknesses are probably a narrowness of subject matter, a temptation towards flippancy and the pathetic need to make people like me. Currently I’m struggling with a lack of confidence and direction, which I will clearly need to conquer if I’m going to write another novel.

Why is the title of this book Angels and Men? Why not Women and Men, which might be more appropriate?

The title comes from the prayer for St Michael and All Angels in the Book of Common Prayer, which begins “O everlasting God, who hast ordained and constituted the services of Angels and men in a wonderful order…” “Women and Men” sounds boring. I intended the novel to resonate with a sense of eerie otherness, and the image of the angels watching over the city was central to that.

Questions  for Andrew Cowan on the novel Crustaceans by Kouhei Furuya, Yuko Kato, Jun Ohashi, and Takuya Osada.
Part 2

Tokyo University, 7 December 2003

First of all, many thanks for your generous response to our previous interview.  Your answers were very helpful and informative, we felt, though with one exception.  It was hard to understand your method of writing. As well as writing and revising each line, do you come back later and revise every line again?  Once you decide on the nature of Euan’s accident, for example, there is clear foreshadowing earlier on.  Why bother with so much earlier revision if you have to come back and revise again later?

On the whole, I don’t come back and revise later.  One reason I write so slowly is that I am constantly trying to think about what will (or might) happen 100 pages later.  I do write rough notes for later; I constantly think about what is to come. So there is a lot of foreshadowing going on. Occasionally I will realise I must go back 50 pages and alter something. I HATE it when this happens.

Related to the last question, there’s a sense of fragmentation in the novel. One finely crafted sentence and then another (you use very few conjunctions between sentences). How far is this deliberate, and what effect do you think it creates?

A key working idea for Crustaceans was fragmentation, the idea that this man’s life had been shattered. The narrative is then an act of piecing together. 

But Paul is in a way a reluctant narrator. He is still half in his shell. So he speaks in short (-ish) sentences. It was half-deliberate. I did also try to substitute for conjunctions with rhythm and cadence – the rhythm of the prose is supposed to ameliorate any fragmentariness in the writing.

In my current work-in-progress I find I am writing much longer sentences than is normal for me.  Lots of conjunctions.  Perhaps this is a belated reaction to the prison-house of the style in Crustaceans.

We noted many instances of replicas, imitations, otherness.  What is true for Paul is often true for other characters, as life stories seem set to repeat themselves. Borges said that every story will be repeated. In what ways would you say Crustaceans is exclusively your book, and could only have been written by you?

There are many parallels and recurrent motifs in the book. This again was a deliberate thing, to offset (or compensate for) the fragmentariness, to give an underlying unity. That’s one thing.

The Borges idea is another thing entirely. If you pare down Crustaceans so that only the ‘story ‘ remains – man loses child – then yes, I’m sure this will and can be repeated.  But the novel is so much a product of my sensibility, my noticing, my way of punctuating, my own life experiences, it could only ever have been written by me – for better or worse.

Were you disappointed by the commercial reaction to the book?  Or is it enough for critics, students, and translators to value it? What, in fact, do you think of readers?  If you liked them more, wouldn’t you write an easier book? Or are readers simply too stupid to understand?

I was and am very disappointed that the book hasn’t sold more copies.  Every writer wants to sell lots of copies, especially if his livelihood depends on book sales.

I’m also very pleased that those who have read it do mostly seem to value it.

As for readers, it would be crippling for any writer to try to anticipate what ‘they’ will think or want.  Who are ‘they’?  ‘Readers’ is such a generalising concept. There are thousands of potential readers, all completely individual. How can a writer hope to please them all?  Some will be stupid, some will be highly sensitive and intelligent, some will find Crustaceans ‘hard’, some will think it ‘easy’. A writer can only write the book that he or she feels it is necessary and vital for him or her to write, otherwise it won’t be an authentic act of self-expression, and it won’t be a distinctive (ie individual, unique) piece of work.

Of course, it can be ‘distinctive’ and bloody awful. But far better that than a book which is written to be ‘pleasing’ and ends up indistinguishable from a thousand others.

We were very impressed by the sufficiency of the word ‘enough’ on the final page.  Did you feel this novel is enough?  Is there anything, in retrospect, that you’d like to change, to delete or add?

The book is done and gone now. The last time I re-read it there were sentences I wanted to rephrase, but too late.  I am pretty happy with it.  (My second novel, Common Ground, was written in more of a hurry, under more pressure from a publisher, and I feel that that book is one third too long.  If I had another life I would begin that book from scratch, and it still pains me that I can’t.)

And if this is enough, what type of book can you write next? Can you write in any other way?  How do you stop your next book being the same type of novel?

I wouldn’t write another book like it, because I’ve said enough (for me) on that subject in that style.  My present book is set in summer, concerns a private detective, and is written in longer, more generous sentences, and has more dialogue. The underlying sensibility is no doubt very similar, but the ‘product’ is quite different.

Questions  for Andrew Cowan on the novel Crustaceans by Kouhei Furuya, Eri Higuchi, Yuko Kato, Jun Ohashi, Akira Ohkubo, and Takuya Osada.

Tokyo University, 6 November 2003

Your book, Pig, was a story about a pig. The word ‘crustacean’ is quite difficult, unfamiliar, and were you not afraid that the readers will find it difficult to imagine that this novel is about a father-son relationship with this title? Have you ever thought of having another title?

No, this was always going to be the title. It has three kinds of resonance for me.  1.  It’s a word of private significance for Paul, because it’s the first word he imagines teaching his new-born son.  2.  It has seaside connotations. 3. It has connotations of being introverted, hiding away, retreating into one’s shell for protection, all of which apply to Paul.

Also, I felt it had a kind of ‘family connection’ with ‘Pig’ – a single word, natural history.

(Actually, in my local bookstore the novel was briefly displayed on the Natural History shelves.)

For a writer, I think, the name of a book is as important as the name of his child.  It has to have some kind of personal resonance, it has to feel ‘precious’ and ‘private’ in some way.  I’ve never believed a reader cares all that much. It matters to me that my daughter is called ‘Rose’ and my book is ‘Crustaceans’. So far as the rest of the world is concerned, they might as well be called ‘Arthur’ and ‘Damascus’ – both equally fine names, but not mine.

Having said which, I was working last year with a Japanese translator (an MA student at UEA) who was translating the start of Crustaceans.  She had enormous difficulty with the title because it seems it doesn’t have a non-technical, single-word equivalent in Japanese, and doesn’t have the same connotations of seaside and introversion.

We, Japanese students, are not familiar with English names.  Do the names of the characters in your novel have any particular sense or meanings?

No, I always struggle with characters’ names.  The main thing is to avoid using the names of friends and relations, which can cause upset or confusion.

None of my characters, so far as I can remember, has a name with wider cultural associations.

Do you have any particular beach or town in your mind to write this novel?

Yes, it is an amalgam of Hunstanton (the cliffs), Sheringham and Overstrand (the caravan site), Cromer and Yarmouth (the town) – all of them seaside towns in Norfolk, England, close to where I live.

In Crustaceans, there are a lot of impressive images, which seem to represent the character’s emotion. For example, the colour white seems to express the pessimistic mood of the narrator. In your process of writing Crustaceans, which did you create first, characters or images?

I wasn’t honestly aware of using white to express pessimism. I’m very often unaware of the wider significance, for a reader, of what I put on the page.

This is an extremely difficult question to answer because the way I write is a mystery to me.  Someone has said that writing is a form of thinking. I don’t, as a rule, think (or imagine, or invent, or plan) before writing. I put down a sentence; I revise it endlessly; I put down another.  Slowly – very slowly – a world develops (suggested by images, details, etc).  Characters develop in the same way. They don’t exist prior to my writing them down.

In contemporary literature, use of present tense is considered to be fashionable.  Did this trend affect you when you were choosing the main tense of Crustaceans? Or did you have your own reasons?

I wasn’t aware that present tense was fashionable. If I’d known I would have avoided it!

I chose present tense, and first person, because they are intimate and immediate, and the book is supposed to be a father talking to his son, over the course of one day, so they seemed appropriate.

Plus, there is a lot of remembering in the book, which means a lot of flashbacks to the past.  So, technically, it would simplify matters (in terms of getting grammatical tenses right) if I began in the present tense.

The frame of the novel is Paul, the narrator, telling a story to Euan, as if the boy was there.  Paul then describes having sex with Euan’s mother, Ruth.  Does the frame of the novel break down in these, or any other, episodes?

I hope not.  I was aware of the jarring this might cause to a reader’s sensibilities, and in a way it was deliberate.  I wanted to emphasise the ‘madness’ involved in Paul’s narration. He is taking his dead, absent son on an excursion to the seaside, after all. 

Many parts of the expression in Crustaceans clearly show the state of someone who is in depression.  Did they come out of your own experience of being seriously depressed?  If not, how did you research depression?

I became very depressed during the writing of this book, yes.  It took me 4 years and I was often blocked. The mystery for me is whether  it was the writing of the book that made me depressed, or whether the book was the result of my being depressed in the first place. 

I am happy now, though.

Was it before or after the birth of your own daughter that you first decided to write a novel about a father losing his son? If it was after your daughter was born, why did you make it a son, not a daughter?

Becoming a father made me suddenly vulnerable to all kinds of emotions I wasn’t previously aware of.  It also made me much more responsive to the vulnerabilities of others, and made me better able to empathise with parents who had lost children.

I often clip stories from newspapers, if they interest or disturb or affect me.  I paste them in scrapbooks, and when I finish a book I usually look through my scrapbooks for a clue as to what to write next.  I was quite shocked to see the number of stories in my scrapbooks concerning parents losing children. These were collected after my daughter was born. There was 5 years’ worth.

I found them very upsetting. And I was intrigued, in a way, that I found them so upsetting. I think I began Crustaceans as a way of exploring that rawness, or vulnerability, in myself.

To write about a girl would have been too close to home; it would’ve felt like tempting fate.  Also, I wanted to make the point that Paul had lost two young boys.  The first was himself.  He is grieving almost as much for his own lost childhood as for Euan.

In Crustaceans, relationships between parent and child are often described as painful ones.  Do you think today it is possible for parent and child to have good relationships naturally with each other?

Yes!

I would say that most of my contemporaries had a difficult relationship with their parents, and that most are trying to correct that failure in their relationship with their own children.  Part of that effort (if this isn’t a paradox, or a contradiction) is to have a natural relationship.

Does writing come easily to you? The class here in Tokyo thinks probably not. Would you describe writing, and being a writer, as pleasures?

Why does the class suppose writing doesn’t come easily to me?

But it’s true, it doesn’t. I rarely find writing pleasurable. It is a daily encounter with failure, with inadequacy.  The achievement never matches the ambition. The words never seem the right words. The effort is always so much greater than the reward.

But, I’d be lost if I didn’t write.  I’ve fantasised for years of finding something else to do.  I think I realise now that nothing else would quite hold me together.  There is a definite need to write.  If I didn’t answer that need I think I’d feel without a centre.

Having said which, I have found the perfect antidote to writing, the perfect counterbalance. Pottery – handling clay, making things quickly, using my body and visual faculties – helps alleviate the frustrations of writing (or, in my case, for much of the day, not writing).

What are your favourite books, both classics and contemporary, and both fiction and non-fiction. What book(s) do you think affected you most?

My favourite classics are those I encountered at school, that in some way awakened me – the novels of Thomas Hardy and James Joyce.  They’ve very unlike each other, but equally important to me.  I wouldn’t say either has been influential on my own writing, however.

My favourite contemporary writer by a mile is the American Richard Ford.   He is a definite influence in terms of range of subject matter (fairly narrow, provincial, domestic) and style (realistic, naturalistic, first person, intimate) though what he has and I never will is a fluent, mellifluous, accommodating, infinitely flexible way of writing a sentence.

If Crustaceans should be made into a movie, do you think that the essence of the novel would be lost?  Are there things that can be expressed only in the form of a novel?

This is a very interior book; it all happens in the mind of one man; it’s a whispered monologue to an imagined child.  I cannot imagine it being made into a film. I think there are things that can only be expressed in a novel, yes.  

Pig, however.