The Sussex Variations
Dooney’s is serializing, on a weekly basis, Brian Fawcett’s manuscript The Sussex Variations. Edited by Karl Siegler, this is one of the last books Fawcett completed before his death, from pulmonary fibrosis, on February 27, 2022. Fawcett is a founding co-editor of dooneyscafe.com since its inception in 2001.
This page functions as a table of contents for the fifteen chapters of the serial.
Read Stan Persky's elegy for Brian Fawcett, Joined at the Mind.
Brian Fawcett, age 18, from northern British Columbia, arrives at his uncle’s and aunt’s pig farm in Sussex, England, and comes-of-age as two 400-pound boars charge into battle.
Brian Fawcett’s “Sussex Variations, or Two Boars,” Ch. 2. People feel distress. So do pigs. Living and learning on an English farm.
Brian Fawcett learns about males and females, both human and porcine, on a pig farm in Sussex, England in the early 1960s.
Brian Fawcett learns about the gory details of life on the farm. Ch. 4 of “The Sussex Variations.”
In Ch. 5 of Brian Fawcett’s “Sussex Variations,” there’s courage, war, character and a dying boar.
On a Sussex pig farm in 1963, Brian Fawcett is thinking about the intelligence of pigs, dogs, humans, and nuclear missiles.
Brian Fawcett gets to a pig farm in Sussex, England the long way around. He goes through a brain glitch, the Visigoths’ sack of Rome, the Cuban Missile Crisis, and the British Museum Reading Room. Ch. 7 of The Sussex Variations traverses the History of the Knowable World.
An 18-year-old Canadian with writerly ambitions, working on his uncle and aunt’s Sussex pig farm, gets to meet the butler of famed English literary critic, Cyril Connelly. Ch. 8 of “The Sussex Variations, or Two Boars.”
Brian Fawcett on the importance of clear instructions, the use of “hogwash,” and the art of playing ping pong in Ch. 9 of “The Sussex Variations, or Two Boars.”
Oh, yes, there was a third boar on the Sussex pig farm in 1962 where a visiting Canadian with literary ambitions learned a lot about life and livestock. Ch. 10 of Brian Fawcett’s “The Sussex Variations, or Two Boars.”