Tag: horses

Alex Miller, Allen & Unwin, Australia, Author, Book review, Fiction, historical fiction, literary fiction, Publisher, Setting

‘Coal Creek’ by Alex Miller

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Coal-Creek

Fiction – paperback; Allen & Unwin; 304 pages; 2014. Review copy courtesy of the publisher.

Coal Creek, published in the UK earlier this year, is typical of what I have come to expect from Alex Miller’s writing: quietly understated prose, slowly paced narratives, characters who are deep thinkers and themes which are universal.

Outback life

This story, set in the Queensland outback in the 1950s, unfolds gently but culminates in violence.

The narrator, Bobby Blue (short for Robert Blewitt), is a simple man with a strong moral compass, who finds it difficult to express himself so usually says nothing — occasionally to his disadvantage. He left school as a 10-year-old (“my mother never did get the chance to teach me nothing”) and became a stockman with his father and two others. Later, after the death of his father, he decides to work for the police, putting his horsemanship and knowledge of the bush to good use, tracking thieves and stolen stock and helping to settle the odd property dispute.

His boss, Constable Collins, is an ex-soldier who survived World War Two’s New Guinea campaign. He grew up on the coast but has accepted a bush posting, dragging his wife and daughters with him. He’s a bit out of his depth and is struggling to adjust to the scrub — he’s no natural bushman, which means he is increasingly reliant on Bobby’s skill and knowledge, although he is too arrogant to admit it.

There’s not much crime to investigate apart from the odd family feud and a bit of cattle rustling. Indeed, the previous constable used to turn a blind eye to much of this because he preferred to let people sort things out for themselves, but Collins is different: he only ever sees things in black and white, and believes his job is to police the community in the strictest possible sense. So, when an old aboriginal woman claims that Ben Tobin, an old school friend of Bobby’s, has hit Deeds, his aboriginal girlfriend, Collins is ready to throw the book at him — despite a lack of evidence.

And so Miller sets up his key theme — that of the stranger in a strange land (Collins) doing a job for which he’s ill-equipped — and pits him against the seemingly naïve and silent local (Bobby), who knows the landscape intimately and feels, if not at one with it, certainly a part of it.

First person narrative

The narrative, told entirely from Bobby’s point of view, is written in the voice of a simple, uneducated man — complete with grammatical errors —  who desperately misses his late mother and is starved of female company until Collins’ wife, Esme, encourages him to share meals with her family. Through this, Bobby develops a close friendship with the Collins’ 12-year-old daughter, Irie, who teaches him to read. But while these were simpler times and Bobby seems strangely asexual, this relationship between a man and a prepubescent girl threatens to destroy everything that Bobby holds dear.

And while I would describe Coal Creek as a proper slow burner — it took me a long time to get into — the story has a funny way of sneaking up on you and then holding on. This is largely due to the strong voice (and the wonderful storytelling), which puts you in the head of a narrator who is relating the story as it happened to him in the past (remember, things happen slowly in the bush). And because he often indicates that he wished he’d done or said something differently, a sense of doom, melancholia and regret begins to build. There’s lot of foreshadowing so that you know the narrative is going to culminate in an unhappy ending or dramatic event.

But what I liked most about this novel is the ways in which the landscape dominates the entire story; it’s beauty and strangeness, the way in which it makes man very small and insignificant, is a metaphor for the conflict between Bobby and Collins — that to survive in this land you need to understand it, or at least respect it.

We are only men. When you live as we had lived our lives in the scrubs you know you are not the boss of nothing and there is the sky and the eagles and the scrubs going on forever into them great stone escarpments. No man knows himself to be the boss of that.

Essentially Coal Creek is a love story — not only Bobby’s love for Irie, but of his mother and of the landscape and way of life. It’s also a very good examination of loyalty, trust, male friendship and the ties which bind mothers and sons. And it’s an eye-opening look at black and white relations, and the way in which remote rural areas are policed.

It is very much typical Alex Miller fare: richly evocative, intelligent and unsentimental, tethered to a strong sense of place and peopled by well-drawn characters. Don’t let the slow pace turn you off: this is one of the most absorbing stories I’ve read all year.

Allen & Unwin, Australia, Author, Book review, Courtney Collins, Fiction, historical fiction, literary fiction, Publisher, Setting, Western

‘The Burial’ by Courtney Collins

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The-burial

Fiction – paperback; Allen & Unwin UK; 310 pages; 2013. Review copy courtesy of the publisher.

Courtney Collins’ The Burial is such an extraordinarily powerful book it’s hard to believe it was written by a first-time novelist. From the opening line — “If the dirt could speak, whose story would it tell?” — to the closing sentence, I was held in thrall by the exquisite prose, the luscious descriptions of the bush and a cast of curious well-drawn characters. But most of all I was captivated by the storytelling.

Female bushranger

The Burial tells the tale of Jessie Hickman, a female bushranger who rustles horses and duffs cattle, in the years after the Great War. The book opens in dramatic style: she’s just given birth to a premature baby while on the run and she’s buried it alive.

In a distinctive and unusual twist, it is the dead baby that narrates the story — a literary device that feels more natural and less showy or intrusive than you might initially expect. Indeed, the baby has so much sympathy for her mother, that you immediately warm to Jessie despite her track record as livestock thief, convict and murderer.

Through a series of flashbacks we learn about Jessie’s colourful past, which includes a stint as a circus rider and a two-year stretch in prison.  We also learn how she was apprenticed to Fitzgerald “Fitz” Henry, a fiery red-headed man living in a remote valley, to help him break in horses. She later marries Fitz, even though he treats her appallingly and is violent and abusive from the first day they met — any wonder she decides to do him in.

You might like to think of your own mother knitting blankets expanding outwards in all colours while you were in her womb. Or at worst vomiting into buckets. On the eve of my birth, my mother concertinaed my father while I lay inside her. Six foot, eight inches. She brought him down with the blunt side of an axe.

But this is not just Jessie’s story — the narrative also covers the two men who are on her trail: the opium-addicted Sergeant Barlow and the aboriginal tracker Jack Brown who secretly knows (and loves) Jessie but never lets on.

Adventure and romance with a Western feel

Part adventure tale, part romance, part Western (but without the gunslinging), The Burial has already earned Collins comparisons with Cormac McCarthy. I haven’t read enough of McCarthy’s work to tell whether the praise is justified, but I did find it reminiscent of Paulette Jiles’ civil war novel Enemy Women, which I loved when I read it more than a decade ago.

There’s a beautiful, haunting quality to the writing, which brings to life a diverse range of characters, as well as an Australian landscape of heavily wooded mountains and big open star-filled skies.

And Jessie, who is based on a real female bushranger, is wonderful company: feisty, unafraid, daring and brave.

The Burial is a dazzling book and one that has already garnered critical acclaim and prize nominations aplenty in Australia. It has been optioned for a feature film, which is hardly surprising — Collins writes with an eye for detail without ever losing sense of the bigger picture, which is to tell a dramatic story in a visual and exhilarating way.  It will be published in the UK by Allen and Unwin on May 2.

Alex Miller, Allen & Unwin, Author, Book review, England, Fiction, literary fiction, Publisher, Setting

‘The Tivington Nott’ by Alex Miller

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Tivington-Nott

Fiction – paperback; Allen & Unwin; 180 pages; 2013. Review copy courtesy of the publisher.

It somehow seems appropriate to post this review on the day of the Grand National, a horse race over jumps that has its roots in both hunting and steeplechasing (in which farmers would race their horses from one church steeple to another, jumping over ditches, hedges and whatever else happened to get in the way as they did so). Whatever you think of the National, there’s no doubt that it demonstrates the superb athleticism of the horse. It also demonstrates the special relationship between horse and rider — how the two can work as one to achieve great feats of courage and stamina.

That’s one of the central themes of Alex Miller‘s debut novel, The Tivington Nott, which was first published in 1989, but has just been made available to British readers for the first time thanks to a reprint by the publisher Allen & Unwin UK. It is an extraordinarily vivid account of one young man’s participation in a stag hunt on the Exmoor borders and is filled with beautiful descriptions of Nature and the countryside — “the last ancient homeland of the wild red deer in England” — as well as depicting the bond between horse and rider like nothing I have ever read before.

An outsider’s view

The story is set in 1952 on a farm in Somerset, where the unnamed narrator is a teenage labourer from London struggling to fit in. The first part of the novel sets out to describe how he is at odds with everyone around him — he refuses to call his boss master as tradition dictates, gets bullied by local labourers and is viewed with disdain by the farmer’s wife (“Mrs Roly-Poly”) who believes “boys from London cannot be trusted”.

The only person with whom he should feel some affinity is another outsider, Major Fred Alsop, a retired Australian army officer trying too hard to be accepted by the locals who secretly despise him. The Major wears the attire of the landed gentry, talks too loudly and goes about as if he owns the place (“An Australian horseman in fancy dress prancing around on Exmoor. Out of a book, this bloke. A tourist!”). But even our narrator cannot fail to notice that the Major will never fit in —  he is tolerated because he has a rather impressive, and much sought-after, black stallion imported from Australia called Kabara.

It is Kabara that forms the bridging link between the first part of the story and the (far larger) second part, because our narrator ends up riding the stallion in the stag hunt, which is so evocatively described that you feel as if you are right there in the saddle with him.

Based on real people and events

Alex Miller makes no secret that this book is largely autobiographical — he, too, was a farm labourer in West Somerset when he was 15, before he emigrated to Australia alone when he was 17 . His “author’s note” at the front of my edition claims that all the characters are based on real people and that he even used some of their real names.

This probably explains why the novel feels so authentic and “animated”. You get such a sense of the claustrophobic closed social system in which he finds himself that it’s hard not to share his loneliness and alienation. And it’s easy to understand why he so identifies with Kabara, a gutsy stallion who defies the odds to compete with other horses more used to challenging West Country terrain than him, and the “Tivington nott”, a local stag that has no antlers rumoured to live in the area.

What I loved most about the book was the sense of adventure and excitement it conveys as the narrator rides second horse to the stag hunt. Every little moment of the chase is recorded — the uphill battles, the treacherous descents, the death-defying jumps — so that most of the time your heart is in your throat willing him to stay on the horse and keep in sight of the hounds. And all the time Miller is conscious of conveying the mysterious beauty of the natural world.

In front of me the wide silent ride winds deep into the dark green and dun shadows of the ancient woods. I peer down this track, shaded and thick on either side with bracken and underbrush. A bird is calling repeatedly in there; a sharp short urgent sound, again and again. Then it stops and everything is silent and still around me. Those great dogs are in there too, somewhere. They are intently unravelling the labyrinth of animal scents, some of them perhaps staying true to the peculiar signature of the Haddon stag, approaching his secret lair, working the complex line closer to him by the minute.

Threaded into this thrilling narrative are little insights into various characters — the houndsman Grabbe, the whipper-in Matthew Tolland, the red-coated huntsman Perry, the chairman of the Hunt Damages Committee Harry Cheyne and the master of the hunt, Mrs Grant, among others — so that a well rounded picture of this close-knit community, where class and social standing is everything, is evoked.

But this is not just a fast-paced spinetingling read: the conclusion is a deeply moving one as our narrator realises Kabara has found his place, but he still hasn’t quite found his…

Allen & Unwin, Australia, Author, Book review, Fiction, Gillian Mears, literary fiction, Publisher, Setting

‘Foal’s Bread’ by Gillian Mears

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Foal's-Bread

Fiction – Kindle edition; Allen & Unwin; 368 pages; 2011.

A book about horses would not normally be my cup of tea, but Gillian Mears’ Foal’s Bread — her first novel in 16 years — is more than just a story about equines.

It’s a story about love, sex, joy, sadness, jealousy and ambition. It’s about complicated families and the ways in which history often repeats itself within those families. It’s about the hardship of living on the land in the years between the wars, of milking cows and breeding horses, despite floods, drought and raging bush fires. But above all, it’s about aspiring to better things — and chasing dreams.

Tomboy Noah

When the book opens we meet 14-year-old Noah, a tomboy, and her father, Cecil, as the pair are coming to the end of a two-week job — driving a mob of pigs to market via horseback. It’s 1926 and the setting is rural New South Wales.

We soon learn that Noah has a love of horses and, specifically, of jumping them over high jumps — what we now tend to call “puissance” — on the equestrian showjumping circuit. And once the pigs have been loaded onto the boat that will take them to market in Sydney, Noah will be free to compete in the ladies’ highjump at Port Lake Show; her dad will compete in the men’s equivalent.

But first, the reader is let in on a shameful and sordid secret: Noah is pregnant and her Uncle Nipper, who has just died, aged 80, is the father. While her dad is off boozing in town for the evening, Noah gives birth alone in their camp by a creek with only the “pigs watching what was coming out from between her own legs”.

Confronting scene

As an opening to a novel, this is quite a confronting — and shocking — scene. Even more so, when Noah just gets on with it, wraps the “rag doll” in a shirt, plants a kiss on its face, puts it in a butter box and sends it down river, never to be seen again.

A kind of triumphant relief was sweeping through her that it was done, the baby gone. She couldn’t realise that for the rest of her life she’d be watching Flaggy Creek spinning away from her, the fast waters making it disappear like a little bend-and-flag pony that’s forgotten to take the final turn.

All is not lost, however, because a week later Noah meets the man who becomes the love of her life: Rowley — known as Roley — Nancarrow, an Australian showjumping champion. He presents her with a foal’s bread, a bread-shaped piece of placenta that some foals have in their mouths when they are born, which is dried out as a good luck charm.

“In a high-jump foal, it’s a sure sign he’ll go to the heights’ for a galloper, fast,” explains Roley.

The charm works — for a little while, anyway. The pair marry, have children, set up a home on the Nancarrow family farm and make plans to start their own showjumping team.

Grand sweeping drama

But in the tradition of grand sweeping dramas, life does not play out the way both Noah and gentle, kind-hearted Roley plan. Curveballs come in the form of a fiercely jealous and bullying mother-in-law, who does her best to drive a wedge between her son and Noah. One of their children is born disabled. And Roley, who survives a lightning strike, develops numbness in his feet and legs which puts an end to his showjumping career.

There comes a point when Noah must run the farm unaided and this is when her emotional problems, so long repressed, manifest themselves in violent outbursts — usually directed at her horses, whom she treats cruelly — and alcoholic binges.

This probably sounds like a soap opera, but Mears refrains from emotionally manipulating the reader. Indeed, the novel is completely free of sentiment, but somehow, in giving her narrative such a strong sense of time and place, you get so caught up in the mood of Foal’s Bread that it’s hard not to care for the people she writes about. Yes, it’s a sad story (Lisa, from ANZLitLovers, says “Foal’s Bread is not a book to ‘enjoy’”) — but there’s something about it that makes it a compelling read.

No neat solutions

What I admire most about Mears’ skill as a writer is that she never offers her characters neat solutions. They are left to flounder, to muddle along; they feel flesh-and-blood real. The Nancarrow family are not great communicators. No one ever explains how they are feeling. But the way the characters talk — in a stilted, old-fashioned vernacular — seems to fit the mood of the story.

As much as I enjoyed following the trials and tribulations of this complicated, strange family, I was occasionally disoriented by the time shifts — for instance, one minute Noah is 14, the next she is 22 and happily married. And some of the prose feels slightly clunky — normally when Mears is filling in backstory for her characters or explaining some of the finer points of showjumping history.

The prose, in general, appears to be written in a deliberately old-fashioned style that takes some getting used to — for instance, “the”, as a definite article, is largely absent so that characters go to “main house” instead of “the main house”. (According to Helen Elliot’s review in The Age, “Foal’s Bread is written in the vernacular of the times”.) But once you get into the flow of it, the language works its charm.

I especially loved the way the narrative is tied to the land, and there are reoccurring motifs — the floodwaters, an always-blooming Jacaranda tree, heart-shaped items found in nature — that make it a particularly visual read.

Foal’s Bread is a powerful book and rightly garnered much critical acclaim. You can listen to a fascinating interview with the author on ABC Radio National’s The Book Show.