The Horse Review by Emily Haworth Booth – A profound story about a woman’s love for the horse | imaginary

MShe, Emily Haworth Booth’s brilliant debut novel for adults, is about a woman facing three life-altering crises. The first is premature menopause, which means she can now not have a baby at all. Second, after years of success as a children’s book writer, she finds herself bereft of ideas. The third has to be the least important by all accounts: passion for a horse that isn’t even hers. She pays to ride, feed and care for the animal several times a week. Although this horse seems perverse, he soon becomes the center of her life: her lover.

In a sense, Mary is about childlessness. The book begins with reflections on motherhood: “I knew a mother who said: Want to know what it’s like? Make a list of all the things you like to do, then cross them off one by one. But also: “I knew a mother who knew all the other mothers. As she walked in the park…this mother stopped every few steps to be greeted by other mothers, some with carts, some pregnant. Other mothers clung to this mother like humbuckers. Meanwhile I was hanging beside her, being dragged like a winding kite.” The narrator has decided not to have a child, not for his own sake Things you like to do For reasons, but because the idea of ​​her child’s future in this sick world terrified her. Looking at this, her mind was filled with images of “deserted landscapes hostile to life. Burning cities, flooded cities, desertified prairies.”

When she finally learns that she will never have children, she feels unsettled. She has difficulty feeling connected to friends who are mothers, and avoids her mother, who keeps sending her links to a ridiculously depressing blog called “Kid-Free and Awesome!” She befriends the neighbors’ kids (whom she calls… Not my daughter and Also-not-my-daughter) But they feel lost when they inevitably return home at the end of the day. In the winter, the children stop visiting altogether. From her silent home, she can hear their loud voices and Christmas songs. You’ve impulsively signed a contract to write a children’s book about plastics, and struggle to write paragraphs like: “You can find plastics everywhere! In your school, in stores, even in your home. Look around – how many plastics can you count?”

Her love story with the mare begins: “The horse lived, like a fairy-tale princess, at the end of the train line and at the top of the hill after the final station, accessible only by taxi or bicycle… Only the person who wants more than anything to find the horse will be able to find her.” But there is nothing magical about a horse. She’s an ordinary mare, already middle-aged – 14 when the story begins. This will not be a story about a talented horsewoman discovering her strength. The narrator is, and is, a clumsy rider, and she spends as much time hauling hay and collecting manure as she does riding. A puzzled friend comments: “So are you paying to clean up someone else’s horse droppings?” Lots of fairy tales.

Yet we feel the stable as a mythical world, and the women there – all women – are like secret Freemasons possessing ancient wisdom. “There are about fifty horses here, each attached to a human female. Walking into the yard, there is nothing to see but horses and women, women washing feed pans, women sweeping, women washing buckets, women pushing wheelbarrows, women carrying hats and sacks of woodchips and boxes of straw.” Feeling is not just an action but a ritual. Horses are ambiguous creatures: huge beasts that can easily kill you, but they are also dependent creatures that will die if the beets in their feed are not properly soaked. The mare has no children, just as all these horses have no children; It is impossible to know whether this bothers them. The narrator reflects: “The horse and I are both grown women but the relationship between our sizes is: If I get down on my hands and knees, I can be her foal.” But does the horse feel anything towards her? The narrator is in constant intimacy with the mare’s body, but he cannot begin to understand her mind.

At one point, the narrator reflects on the notes she’s taking: “What I wanted was an unstructured, non-linear, non-narrative, set of impressions that belonged to the continuous present.” While “Mar” becomes a story, its power rests on moments, ideas, and vignettes; Every day is illuminated by the intensity of the once-in-a-lifetime feeling. It is great and special. Endearingly humble and admirably profound. Readers may be reminded of animal memoirs like Raising Hare and H Is for Hawk, but there is an uncertainty here that feels authentic to fiction. Is there something here that belongs to us? What’s going on in other people’s heads? Do we even have a future? We have no way of knowing. But if there is mystical wisdom for women, it is in the shedding and soaking, in that constant present where love is arduous, unrequired and unrewarded, but also in its true form.

Mare by Emily Haworth-Booth is published by Granta (£16.99). To support The Guardian, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery fees may apply.