Two novels I’ve read in the last month involve the relationship between people and animals. The first, Runt by Craig Silvey involves Annie and her dog. The second, Horse by Geraldine Brooks centres on a famous American racehorse, Lexington, and his groom, Jarrett. Both counterpose the unique relationship developed between people and animals with the complicated and often fraught relationships people form amongst themselves.
I was fortunate enough to attend the Berry Writers Festival last month where I heard Craig Silvey speak about his latest book, Runt along with his two earlier novels, Jasper Jones and Honeybee, both wonderful works of adult fiction. He wrote Runt during the pandemic when Western Australia was cut off from the rest of the world. His aim was to write something uplifting, and he succeeded.
Runt is a children’s book that can be enjoyed at all ages. Annie and her stray dog live in the country town of Upson Downs with a colourful family of warm-hearted people. An unscrupulous local figure threatens to take over the town, including her family’s farm. Annie sets out to save the farm by entering Runt in dog agility competitions in the local show and finally at the Krumpets Dog Show in London.
The joy of this book is its simple story-telling style which is enlivened by humour reminiscent of Raold Dahl. Runt would make a great Christmas gift for children who are reading chapter books. They will also enjoy the illustrations in each chapter by Sara Acton. Read it first yourself. It will remind you of the essential goodness in many people.
Geraldine Brooks is another of my favourite Australian authors. Of all her previous novels, I think People of the Book and Caleb’s Crossing are closest to her recently published book, Horse. Where a sacred book tied together the stories of its many owners in People of the Book, a nineteenth century racehorse is central to the novel, Horse. This structure allows Brooks to present the story of a remarkable horse from the perspective of multiple characters. It is also a vehicle for enlarging on themes of discrimination and exclusion due to race explored in Brooks’ earlier historical novel, Caleb’s Crossing.
For readers with little experience of horses and horse-lovers alike, this novel opens a world of breathtaking sensory detail about horses and their affinity with humans. The relationship between Jarrett, a slave and Lexington’s groom, and the horse he has known since its birth, is drawn so convincingly, you feel the pain of both when they are separated and their joy when reunited. The owning and selling of racehorses is linked closely in Horse with the buying and selling of slaves in America, a central theme of the book. From its dual time settings, Horse offers multiple viewpoints from the nineteenth and the twenty-first centuries on issues of the ownership and treatment of both horses and humans as well as conveying the excitement of the racetrack.
Above all, Horse tells a series of captivating stories about the people associated with Lexington during the horse’s life and the characters engaged in studying the history and physical characteristics of the horse in the present day. In Horse, Geraldine Brooks excels in exciting the commitment of readers to all her characters and in her deft depiction of the period leading up to the American Civil War, making it one of those novels you read well into the night.
