"Horse" by Geraldine Brooks

It took me a while to get into this novel, but once I did, I enjoyed reading it a lot.

The horse at the centre of the story is a legendary one called Lexington who won a heap of races in the 1850s in America and sired hundreds of others. The story is quite complex, being set in three different time periods, and concerns not only Lexington’s great deeds, but also the later discovery of his skeleton and (I think) three separate paintings depicting him and his groom, as well as other people. The book is thus partly about racing, partly about the physique of thoroughbred horses and partly about the study of and market for nineteenth century paintings of horses. Underpinning everything, however, is something else which makes the book interesting, thought-provoking and ultimately quite shocking – namely race.

Geraldine Brooks’s starting point was a portrait of Lexington which depicted his black groom, whose identity is unknown. She calls him Jarret, presumes him to have been a slave, and has invented a compelling story about his life as a gifted horse trainer that gets quite exciting as it proceeds into the civil war era. Her second hero is Theo, a graduate art student and former polo ace, living in Washington DC in 2019. He is also black, and the dual narrative serves to remind us how far there still is to go when it comes to the achievement of racial equality in the contemporary USA.

The novel is quite long, and I thought could possibly have been made better had it been a touch briefer earlier on. But the pace mounts towards the end and it is undeniably fascinating in its portrayal of a slice of American society in both the North and the South on the cusp of civil war.

I would characterise this novel, above all, as being highly memorable. Aside from being very well-crafted, there is an originality about its subject matter and structure which mean that it will stick in my mind for a long time.