Patrick McCabe's The Butcher Boy (1992)

Francie next visits the Nugent home when the family is away for the day. He
breaks into the house, admires the polished floors and clean kitechen, helps
himself to food, tries on Philip's English private school uniforms, scrawls "PHILIP
IS A PIG" in lipstick on the wallpaper (63-7), and, in a fantasy episode in which
he imagines he is running a school for pigs aimed at helping Mrs Nugent and Philip
become "good" pigs, he defecates as a pig would do on the carpet of Philip's
bedroom ("pigs are poo animals," Francie explains; "I'm afraid and they simply will
cover the place in it no matter what you do" [66]). Caught in this perverse act of
vandalism, Francie is sent to an industrial school that he nicknames the "school
for pigs" (73). During Francie's time in this school Joe and Philip become friends,
a development that shakes Francie to the core and that exaggerates his feeling of
persecution at the hands of the Nugents. After he is released from the school, Mrs.
Nugent's brother, appropriately, threatens to "gut" Francie "like a pig" (118).
The novel's pig motif is further deveolped when Francie, in the mental
asylum, hallucinates that he is a pig performing before Mrs Connolly and other
women from the neighborhood. His parents, "Ma and Da Pig," are also present in this
hallucination. The assembled women anticipate "the mother and father of a row"
between Francie's parents while Francie pig stands there "watching the flesh of the
apple" that the women have given him "browning" in his hand (162). Mrs Connolly's
appeal for a "row" between his parents (162) emphasizes the extent to which Francie
self-ashamedly views Brady family freakishness to be a source of gossip and
entertainment for the town. A passage in another contemporary novel, Zadie Smith's
White Teeth, nicely addresses the variety of schadenfreude experience by the
townspeople at Francie's expense:

[D]on't ever underestimate the pleasure [people] recieve from viewing pain that is
not their own, from delivering bad news, watching bombs fall on television, from
listening to stifled sobs from the other end of a telephone line. Pain by itself is
just Pain. But Pain + Distance can = entertainment, voyeurism, human ineterst ... a
raised eyebrow, disguised contempt.55

Francie both "loves and hates" Mrs Nugent;56 he wants to be welcomed into the
Nugent home as an honored guest yet abhors this home for the contrast in presents
with his own. When he breaks into the Nugent house it is clear how strongly Francie
fantasizes becoming Philip.

I went round the house like Philip. I walked like him and everything. Mrs Nugent
called up the stairs to me are you up there Philip? I said I was and she

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