GERALDINE BROOKS Horse. Reviewed by Catherine Pardey
In unearthing the story of a 19th-century thoroughbred, Pulitzer Prize-winner Geraldine Brooks examines racism then and now.
Geraldine Brooks takes on a mighty task in her latest novel, Horse, covering events leading up to the American Civil War through the story of champion runner Lexington, and juxtaposing contemporary events, complete with the vague tremors of political correctness that shape so many people’s thoughts today. But of course, she is up to it. What isn’t she up to? For over two decades Brooks’ net has been cast far and wide and whatever she fetches up is always written about convincingly, interestingly, and engagingly. Horse is no exception.
Beginning in the twenty-first century with Theo, a young Black PhD student in Washington DC, who by chance comes across a painting of a horse, Brooks segues seamlessly into the story of Jess, a young Australian who runs the vertebrate osteology lab in the Smithsonian, which is more fun than it sounds. Jess, perhaps like Brooks, misses aspects of her Australian home:
Jess missed … perhaps more than anything else about her Sydney home: the sense of being at the watery edge of things, turning a corner and being confronted by a shimmer of sunlight on waves, a crescent of sand curved below a rock-ribbed headland.
After these brief but effective introductions, Brooks then takes us back to Kentucky in the 1850s to begin the story of Lexington, the horse of the title, and his beloved groom Jarret, which swiftly establishes itself as the main story of the novel. Brooks tells us in her Afterword that Jarret is an entirely fictional character, as indeed are Theo and Jess, but hats off to Brooks, because Jarret, who is only outshone by the horse, is an endearing protagonist whose journey we follow, often with great concern.
And this – our concern for both Jarret and Theo – is the great triumph of the book. Brooks is always reminding us, both in Jarret’s story and Theo and Jess’s story – Theo and Jess quickly and satisfyingly become romantically entwined – that Black lives in the USA have always been, and shamingly still are, too often lived at the racist whims of Whites. The brutality of the slave system endured by Jarret is drawn deftly and movingly:
By the end of the week, his good shirt hung in shreds and red weals bloomed across his shoulders. From before first light till full dark, the days were a blur of throbbing pain, agonized spirits.
The headings for Jarret’s chapters are for the most part not just Jarret’s name but also the name of his owner. Thus the first Jarret chapter is titled ‘Warfield’s Jarret’ because that is who Jarret is, a man who is not free but owned by somebody else.
And Theo, too, despite his story being set in over 150 years after the abolition of slavery, must still confront the prejudices meted out to Black men in the USA. His close friend tells Jess that he has tried to give Theo ‘“the talk”, like their parents did when they were kids’, but Theo, having grown up in England, finds it difficult to comprehend how vastly different English racism and American racism could be.
In her quest to find out about the horse Lexington, Brooks comes across two interesting real-life people who play rewarding walk-on roles in Horse. The artist Thomas J Scott, a thoroughbred painter, serves both to show Northern prejudices, seemingly minimal when compared to those in the South but there all the same, as well as allowing Brooks to give us some contextual knowledge of the nature of the Civil War. Brooks’ knowledge of horses is prodigious, including of their skeletal structure, as is evident in her descriptions of Jess’s work, and her knowledge of painting. Scott was known for incorporating insights into the horse’s personality in his portraits, and in a lovely scene Jarret gives Scott an insight into Glacier, one of the horses on the Warfield property, telling him that he is ‘fly’:
‘Fly means … smart, but quiet about it. Not a know-it-all. Not cunning neither, because that’s like being crooked, and Glacier’s not that way.’
The second walk-on role belongs to Martha Jackson, the American art dealer who, intriguingly, bequeathed Scott’s portrait of Lexington to the Smithsonian. Intriguingly because it was so very different from the kind of art she usually collected and sold. Martha Jackson was also the person who traded her sports car with Jackson Pollack for two of his paintings, and this became the car in which he later died.
Horse is a moving, wonderful story, in parts powerful enough to make a reader cry, as indeed was the last sentence of Brooks’ Afterword, revealing that her husband Tony Horowitz had died while she was writing the novel. It is always the mark of a good writer that they unintentionally make the reader like them as much as they like their writing.
Geraldine Brooks Horse Hachette Australia HB 416pp $39.99
Catherine Pardey has reviewed for Rochford Street Review and The Beast.
You can buy Horse from Abbey’s at a 10% discount by quoting the promotion code NEWTOWNREVIEW or you can buy it from Booktopia.
You can also check if it is available from Newtown Library.
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