Review: Jane Smiley - Nobody's Horse

-
Jane Smiley: Nobody's Horse
Faber & Faber, 2010, £6.99
(First published in America as The Georges and the Jewels)

Reading age 12+


Thanks to Faber for sending me a copy to review.


I've only tried to read one Jane Smiley before: Horse Heaven and that was a bit of a disaster. I struggled on to the middle, but gave up. So, when I heard she'd written a YA novel, I was curious to see what I'd make of it.

Nobody's Horse is the story of Abby, and her parents. Abby's father deals in horses: he buys them cheap in Oklahoma, feeds them up, tidies them, and has Abby ride them until he can truthfully say "a little girl can ride them", and then the horses are sold. So that Abby does not become too attached to the horses, the geldings are all called George, and the mares Jewel. Abby is generally happy with her lot, but not with having to ride Grumpy George, who bucks like a demon, and scares her. Abby's Uncle Luke tries some horse-whisperer tactics (and if you were convinced by the scene in The Horse Whisperer where Tom Booker overcomes Pilgrim's problems by casting him and sitting on him, I don't think Jane Smiley was. When Uncle Luke tries it, Grumpy George is left infinitely worse.) What works with Grumpy George is Jem Jarrow's join-up approach. At least that's what I think it is. Whether it was or not, it makes for an absorbing part of the plot, and I can see today's generation of pony mad girls using this part of the book as a text book as much as their mothers did Josephine Pullein-Thompson's Six Ponies.



What this detached and unjudgemental child has to deal with is considerable: she is a seventh grader at school, and is the outsider, with just one friend, Gloria. The balance of the relationship between Abby and Gloria is upset when new girl Stella appears, and is threatened even more by Stella's pash for a boy in their class; a boy so dull he thinks a blow by blow description of his breakfast is worthy conversation. Abby's fundamentalist father has fallen out with her brother, Danny.

There is much quiet manoevering in this novel: Abby's mother quietly negotiates her way around her husband to see her son, and Abby is her mother's daughter. She accepts what happens to her, and calmly gets on with life. What she has to put up with at school is difficult, but it never seems to grab her soul, which is elsewhere; partly with her devout Christian family, and partly with the horses. Abby never moans about her fundamentalist parents: she simply doesn't tell them when a school project involves the class building Catholic missions, as it is much less fuss. I wondered what would make this detached child shout or scream, for she never does. When she is suspended from school, she doesn't rage at the desperate unfairness of it: she simply goes and works with the horses. That is not to say that Abby does not change: she makes small, quiet, definite and successful moves to assert herself.

All this happens through the horses, who are wonderfully done. Starting to give them names, as Abby does with the orphaned colt Jack, is the start of her separation of herself from her parents. All the changes Abby makes are made within the framework of her family and school: there are no wild bids for freedom; just small adjustments which destroy nothing.

I was very struck by the calm and unhurried pace of the writing. There is no rush through to get to the next incident, no skated over episode. It's a very calming book to read: you soon slip into its rhythm, and become part of the smooth pace of it. I wondered if it was to maintain this pace that the book was set in the 1960s: Is it because it would have been difficult to maintain the slow pace of the novel in the more frenetic, gadget-bound present?

This is an excellent book: my horse book of the year so far. It's absorbing, and believable, with more instructional horse content than anything I've read in a long while: but the book is in no sense a pill, not even a sugared one. The book is more than strong enough to carry the technical stuff. It's also an achievement to portray a fundamentalist family as human beings: like her heroine, Jane Smiley does not judge.


A note on differences between the American original and the UK printing: Grumpy George was Ornery George in the original. The book's first title was The Georges and the Jewels, and it had a different cover.



Comments

Christina Wilsdon said…
I am so glad to read this review. I was pondering this book at the shop the other day as I looked for a surprise for my horse-crazy daugher, and ultimately decided not to buy it as I feared it would be a weepy coming-of-age story in which horses were just a scrim for a teenage/dysfunctional family drama. But it sounds like it is well worth getting!
23 August 2010 at 18:39
Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Rollkur and the blue tongue

-
I've been meaning to write about this all week, but reading the exclusive in Horse and Hound about the controversy tipped me over the edge. For my non-horsy readers, rollkur is a training/warming up technique used by some dressage riders. It basically involves riding the horse with its jaw pulled in virtually to its chest, in order to increase suppleness. Patrik Kittel , a Swedish competitor in Odense was videoed riding his horse in this way. If you watch the video , you'll see the horse's tongue hanging out - blue. It takes a while before the rider notices this. When he does, he stops, puts the horse's tongue back in, and carries on. There are two things which bother me about this. Firstly, I am fully aware large sections of the dressage world, and some of its brighest stars, consider rollkur perfectly ok, but the FEI guidelines state this practice should only be for short periods, allowing the horse to rest. Patrick Kittel apparently rode the horse for two hou
Read more

Archibald, don't eat the bedclothes

-
Image
My friend Louise sent me this picture today. It's from a children's book with the rather wince-making title For The Wee Ones. I thought, when I read that (because I read the message before I looked at the picture) that the picture was going to be a typical winsome production from the school of artists who think (or who are paid to think) that the child is a thing sent from God and a blissful thing. They had obviously never met a child, and certainly not mine. I should have known Louise better. The artist responsible for Archibald, don't eat the bedclothes slipped this one past the editors. Just look at the poor, broken Mother Rabbit. She knows she has not the faintest chance of being listened to, and poor thing, she is stooped in the way of a mother to whom this is just the lastest in a long line of horror; with nothing good to come. And Archibald is obviously the spawn of the Devil. Just look at those eyes. He'll have the bed after he's finished the bedclothes
Read more

Dick Sparrow - 40 Horse Hitch, and Neil Dimmock's 46 Percherons

-
Image
Here's a clip of Dick Sparrow driving 40 horses. It's an amazing sight, particularly when the shot changes to show the team from the rear and you get the great incongruity of modern American corporate architecture as a background to the wagon and horses. I love the anticipation in the video: the sense of something amazing being just round the corner is palpable. Thanks to Christina Wilsdon for telling me about this world record 46 Percheron hitch (alas just stills) but you get the idea.
Read more