Horses – She Reads Novels

This month, one of my favourite authors, Mary Stewart, would have been 100 years old and to mark the occasion I decided it was time to pick up one of the few remaining books of hers that I still hadn’t read. I chose Airs Above the Ground, a suspense novel set in Austria which was first published in 1965 – and it was a great choice because I loved it!

At the beginning of the novel, our heroine, Vanessa March, is angry and disappointed because her husband, Lewis, has insisted on going to Stockholm on a business trip just when they had been due to leave for a summer holiday in Italy. Left behind in London, Vanessa meets a friend, Carmel Lacy, for tea and is shocked when Carmel mentions that she has just seen Lewis in a newsreel about a circus fire in Austria. Convinced that there must have been some mistake, Vanessa goes to watch the news footage herself and discovers that it’s true – not only is Lewis in Austria when he’s supposed to be in Sweden, he has also been caught on film with his arm around a pretty young girl.

Conveniently, Carmel’s teenage son, Timothy, is hoping to go to Vienna to visit his father and Carmel is looking for someone to act as a chaperone. Determined to catch up with Lewis and find out what’s going on, Vanessa agrees to accompany him. On arriving in Austria, however, Tim admits that he hasn’t been completely honest about his relationship with his father and instead he ends up staying with Vanessa as she searches for Lewis. They are an unlikely pair – at seventeen, Tim doesn’t really need a chaperone, especially not one who is only twenty-four herself – but a friendship quickly forms and together the two become caught up in a mystery involving a travelling circus, a mysterious Englishman and an old piebald horse.

Airs Above the Ground is a book I’ve been looking forward to reading for a long time and I wasn’t disappointed at all. I found so many things to enjoy, first and foremost the beautifully written descriptions of the Austrian countryside, the mountains, the villages and the fictional castle of Schloss Zechstein which becomes the focus of the action for the second half of the story:

And, perched on the outermost edge of the crag, like something straight out of the fairy books of one’s childhood, was the Schloss Zechstein, a miniature castle, but a real romantic castle for all that, a place of pinnacles and turrets and curtain walls, of narrow windows and battlements and coloured shields painted on the stone. There was even a bridge; not a drawbridge, but a narrow stone bridge arching out of the forest to the castle gate, where some small torrent broke the rock-ridge and sent a thin rope of white water smoking down below the walls.

Many of Mary Stewart’s novels involve the heroine forming a bond with a lonely or neglected young boy, and while Timothy is too old to be considered a child, it was still good to watch the relationship between them develop. It’s a relationship based entirely on trust, friendship and mutual liking, with no hints of any romantic attraction at all. Of course, unlike most Stewart heroines, Vanessa is already married before the novel even begins and this does give her character a slightly different feel. Like the others, she’s a strong, intelligent and resourceful woman but she’s clearly in awe of Lewis, and although I did enjoy her interactions with her husband, it seemed that whenever he was around she tended to place too much reliance in him and lost some of that strength and resourcefulness.

I also loved Old Piebald, the horse whose master died in the circus fire and whose injured leg Vanessa treats using her veterinary skills. The scene at the end of Chapter 9 where he is grazing in a meadow with circus music playing in the distance has to be one of my favourite moments in all of Mary Stewart’s novels! Horses play an important role in the story – Tim’s real reason for coming to Austria is to get a job with Vienna’s famous Spanish Riding School and it was nice to have an opportunity to learn more about the school and its beautiful Lipizzaner stallions. The novel takes its title from the movements performed by these horses, known as the ‘airs above the ground’.

As well as all of the other things I’ve mentioned, there’s also plenty of drama, including a desperate race around the castle battlements, a car chase and a scene involving a mountain railway train. Airs Above the Ground hasn’t become one of my absolute favourite Stewart novels, but it’s definitely in my top five or six (I’ve read eleven of her suspense novels so far, plus three of her Arthurian novels). Have you read this one? And have you done anything to celebrate Mary Stewart’s centenary?

Despite being an avid reader as a child, I somehow missed out on Michael Morpurgo. The only one of his books that I read was Twist of Gold, at an age when I was starting to consider myself ‘too old’ for the children’s section of the library, and all I can remember is that it was about two children from Ireland who go to America to find their father during the Irish potato famine, and that it made me cry. But last week I read my second Michael Morpurgo book, War Horse, because I had decided to go to see the new Steven Spielberg film and wanted to read the book first. And War Horse, like all the best children’s books, is a book that can be enjoyed by people of all ages.

War Horse has a strong anti-war message and shows us the horrors of World War I from a very unusual perspective. The story is narrated by Joey, a young thoroughbred horse, who is bought at auction by a poor farmer from Devon. The farmer soon regrets this decision but his son, Albert, forms a special bond with Joey and trains him to work on the farm, determined to prove to his father that he hasn’t wasted his money. However, the family are struggling to pay their rent and when war breaks out in 1914, Joey is sold to an army officer as a cavalry horse. The rest of the story follows Joey’s experiences in France, first with the British cavalry and then pulling ambulances and artillery for the German army, but will he survive the war and will he ever be reunited with Albert?

Being an animal lover, I’m ashamed to admit that I had never given much thought to the suffering of the horses involved in the First World War or what happened to them after the war was over. Seeing things through Joey’s eyes gave a fascinating new perspective and has helped me to learn a little bit about an aspect of the war I had never really considered. Many of the horses serving with Joey are killed in their very first battle (the thought of leading a cavalry charge into a line of machine guns is so horrible to think about) and more of them die of hunger, illness or exhaustion after being forced to pull guns that are too heavy for them up hills and through deep mud.

I couldn’t help comparing this book to Anna Sewell’s Black Beauty, another book narrated by a horse and one of my absolute favourites from my childhood. I should point out that Joey is not a talking horse and although he does interact with other horses, including his best friend Topthorn, he never actually ‘speaks’ to them in the way Black Beauty does. And yet I found Black Beauty a much more convincing horse narrator than Joey. I kept forgetting that Joey was supposed to be a horse as I thought he sounded very much like a human narrator would. But to be fair, this is a different type of book and Joey is telling his story in a different way.

War Horse has a reputation for being very sad and emotional, and yes, I did have tears in my eyes a few times. The story never becomes too sentimental, but poor Joey does go through a lot of traumatic experiences, and of course the war itself is always distressing to read about. However, because the book is so short (it can easily be read in an hour or two) many of the characters we meet are only around for a few chapters and for one reason or another don’t appear again. This made it difficult to really form a connection with them and so the story didn’t have quite the emotional impact on me that I had been expecting. I’m sure though that if I’d been reading this book at the age of nine or ten I would probably have cried from beginning to end!

One of the things I really loved about the book was that Joey, being a horse, doesn’t ‘take sides’; he doesn’t see the British as good and the Germans bad, for example. Instead he is able to tell the story from a neutral viewpoint, something that is very rare in a novel about war. Joey meets and makes friends with soldiers in both armies and also with a French civilian and his granddaughter. And although he witnesses a lot of cruelty and destruction, he also experiences kindness and compassion from people on both sides. There’s a wonderful moment when a British soldier and a German soldier leave their trenches to meet in no man’s land. I won’t tell you why they do this, but this scene and others like it are what made this book such a powerful read.

This is my first book for the War Through the Generations challenge, which has a World War I theme this year. For anyone else participating in the challenge, I would highly recommend War Horse as a quick but very moving read.