In a museum laboratory, a young osteologist – a scholar of bones – reassembles the skeleton of a 19th-century racehorse. The animal has spent decades fixed too haughtily upright; a prim parody of a thoroughbred. Rewired, he may run again, if only in the imaginations of those who stare at his bare, beautiful frame.
In her sixth novel, Horse, Geraldine Brooks attempts the same feat on the page – setting loose a history-bound stallion. Her subject is the famed Kentucky thoroughbred Lexington, king of the antebellum racetrack. “A horse so fast that the mass-produced stopwatch was manufactured so his fans could clock times in races that regularly drew more than twenty thousand spectators,” Brooks marvels. “A horse so handsome, that the best equestrian artists vied to paint him.” Lexington was famously virile, too, the greatest sire of his age; the father of dynasties and battle steeds.
But underneath the romance lies a dark inevitability: antebellum horseracing was an industry of white prestige built on the plundered labour of Black horsemen. “As I began to research Lexington’s life, it became clear to me that this novel could not merely be about a racehorse,” Brooks explains in her afterword. “It would also need to be about race.” It’s the kind of solemn and virtuous statement that can make a reader wary; that unmistakable whiff of good intentions.
In green-pastured Kentucky in the early 1850s, an itinerant artist – a painter of rich men’s horses – is struck by the beauty of a white-socked foal, and captures the animal on canvas. Watching him paint is Jarret, an enslaved groom who will tend to the horse until its dying breath. It is the last defiant decade of US slavery, and the boy and the horse will be bought and sold together. “A racehorse is a mirror,” the painter tells Jarret, “and a man sees his own reflection there.”
More than 160 years later, an oil painting of a white-socked horse is dumped on the roadside in Washington DC. It’s salvaged by Theo, a graduate student with an equine fixation. The equestrian art of the antebellum south often includes Black stablemen, and Theo is writing his PhD on the dehumanising equivalences these paintings make between man and beast – the gilt-edged boast of ownership.
Horse moves between Lexington’s record-breaking life and his cultural afterlife; between Jarret’s world and Theo’s. Jarret is denied the dignity of his own name; Theo is the poshly educated son of diplomats; but both are living in policed Black bodies. Horse is a tale of America’s inescapable and ever-braided legacies: the mythic and the monstrous.
Brooks cut her journalistic teeth on the racing beat, and she knows her way around a horse. This book returns the Australian-American novelist to the terrain that won her a Pulitzer prize with March, her 2005 tale of the war-absent father from Little Women. She brings the same archival confidence and sensory flair to the antebellum racetrack. Jarret’s portion of Horse is exactly the novel you’d expect: bloodlines and broodmares; farriers and knackeries; wild gambles, wild gallops and plantation-era grotesqueries. A dollop of civil war valour. And at the centre of it all, love story: a boy and his horse.
It’s when Brooks resurfaces in the near-present that Horse falters. With his elaborate backstory, convenient thesis and issue-prodding love interest, Theo’s story feels machine-tooled. Raised outside the US, he’s as naive as he is worldly – a man on a collision course with American injustice.
But there’s more than didacticism at play, for Lexington’s history is full of serendipities. An original painting of the racehorse was indeed rescued from street garbage, and his skeleton was discovered lurking in the attic of the Smithsonian. It’s possible to connect the stallion to General Ulysses S Grant and to Jackson Pollock’s reckless death. Brooks cannot bear to leave these details out. Who could? And so Horse crowbars its characters into these cosmic accidents. Six degrees of equine.
But with tender precision, Horse shows us history in flux. As Theo researches his abandoned painting, he encounters the devoted boffins who work to enrich the story we tell of the past: archivists, curators, scientists. It’s here that our osteologist makes an appearance, with her lab of flesh-eating beetles and bleached bones. When a skeleton is hung well, she explains, the armature disappears: “A really good mount allow[s] a species to tell its own story.” A really good historical novel does the same thing, letting the past stretch out into a wild and beastly shape. Horse has strong bones – but the struts and wires are showing.
Horse by Geraldine Brooks is published by Hachette on 15 June in Australia ($39.99) and 16 June in the UK, and by PRH in the US
