The Sport of Kings by CE Morgan review – an epic journey into the deep south

This novel is about horse racing the way Moby-Dick is about a whale; it has a similarly expansive scope, spiritual seriousness and density of grand themes. Shortlisted for the Pulitzer and now the Baileys prize, Morgan’s epic work builds to a climactic series of dramatic race scenes featuring a star filly named Hellsmouth. Along the way, Morgan wrestles with subjects including the history of Kentucky, slavery and its legacies, the iniquities of American healthcare, Darwinism, geology and relations between the sexes. In the maximalist stakes, Morgan’s novel is a muscular, confident entry.

For the first 200 pages, the book appears to be a conventional multigenerational saga set in the American south. The Forge family are corn famers: in the opening section, hot-headed young Henry Forge, classically tutored and prone to trading arguments in Greek or Latin with his tyrannical father, develops a rebellious ambition to transform their farm one day into a thoroughbred breeding business. “I won’t have you throw everything away for a heap of rhinestones,” rages Henry’s father, when his son blurts out his dream. “There is no need for improvement, Henry, only adherence to a line that has never altered, because it’s never proven unsound.” The story that unfolds will reveal the faults in that Forge line, and an unsoundness at its very heart.

After his father’s death, Henry converts the property into a flourishing horse farm, with the aim of breeding a future winner from the great Secretariat. Families and novelistic karma being what they are, when it comes time for Henry’s daughter Henrietta to defy him in turn, it will be not professionally – she is as fascinated as Henry is by horses and genetics, blood lines and evolution – but by getting involved with an African-American groom, Allmon Shaughnessy, which causes shudders of generations-old race-hatred to convulse her jealous father. Their family struggle develops sinister overtones, and the larger mechanism of Morgan’s drama kicks into gear.

At this point, Morgan proves her nerve by crossing a literary divide between white writers and the black characters they may seek to describe. In a long section, she delves into Allmon’s upbringing in Cincinnati, showing us his mother, Marie, struggling with a chronic illness and inadequate medical care, his mostly absent and feckless Irish father, and other white characters who appear either as scolding coaches or prison wardens. (Morgan, a white Ohioan, has spoken with lucid eloquence on the damage caused when a writer feels required to “approach [race] apologetically, even deferentially, without the agency, power and passion that define mature artistry”.) In a harrowing chapter Morgan narrates the escape to freedom of one of the Forge family’s slaves, Scipio, one exhausting night he crosses the Ohio, the river that is “a lullaby and a dirge … a promise made in daylight but upheld by night”.

As the story heats up, so does Morgan’s dense and complex language. Provocative descriptions of the landscape – “viburnum in the yards, pungent as an ovulating woman, pink labial pistils, the leaf bottom shaped like a heart” – become so rich that Morgan even interrupts her prose at one point to ask: “Or is all this too purple, too florid?” Her fascination with Darwin colours descriptions even of romance, so that at one moment Henrietta’s “genes rattled stupidly, purposefully, when his eyes met hers”. And later, when she contemplates an undesired pregnancy: “The gene is not the judge, only the court reporter. Or further: the gene is the prisoner trapped in an organism, which can reason and plan.”

Such thematic shading of many of the characters’ interactions gives the tone of this vibrant, humid novel a paradoxical coolness. Morgan’s people are restrained by the architecture of her system, as well as the systems of their American history, and of race and class. Morgan has been compared, bafflingly, to Elena Ferrante and Meg Wolitzer, whose only common feature would appear to be gender. My comparing mind searches rather for other works that have explored the inextricable weave of American slavery and American narrative: Edward P Jones’s The Known World, for instance. Though surely one can read the influence of another great Ohioan, Toni Morrison, at work in these rich and angry pages. As Morgan notes after telling the mournful story of Scipio’s escape: “All tales are born to be told. They demand it; the dead become tales in order to live. Their eternal life is in your mouth.”