.png)
3 hours ago
6
Mare, Emily Haworth-Booth’s wonderful first novel for adults, is about a woman confronting three life-altering crises. The first is an early menopause that means that she can now never have a child. Second, after years of success as a children’s book writer, she finds herself bereft of ideas. The third should, by all rights, be the least important: a passion for a horse that isn’t even hers. She pays to ride, feed, groom and muck out for the animal a few times a week. Perverse though it seems, this horse soon becomes the centre of her life: her beloved.
In a sense, Mare is about childlessness. It opens with reflections on motherhood: “I knew a mother who said, You want to know what it’s like? Write a list of all the things you love doing and then cross them out, one by one.” But also: “I knew a mother who knew all the other mothers. As she walked through the park … this mother stopped every few strides to be greeted by other mothers, some with buggies, some pregnant. Other mothers stuck to this mother like burrs. Meanwhile I hung by her side, dragged along like a limp kite.” The narrator has decided against having a baby, not for things-you-love-doing reasons, but because the idea of her child’s future in this ailing world terrified her. Considering it, her mind filled with images of “abandoned landscapes hostile to life. Burning cities, flooded cities, desertified meadows.”
When she finally knows she really won’t have children, though, she feels unmoored. She has trouble feeling connection to friends who are mothers, and avoids her own mother, who keeps sending her links to a jarringly cheerless blog called “Child-Free and Fabulous!” She befriends the next-door neighbour’s children (whom she calls not-my-daughter and also-not-my-daughter) but feels lost when, at the end of the day, they inevitably return home. In winter, the children stop visiting entirely. From her silent house, she can hear their clamorous voices and birthday songs. She has rashly signed a contract for a children’s book about plastics, and struggles to write passages such as: “You can find plastics everywhere! In your school, at the shops, and even in your home. Look around – how many plastic items can you count?”
Her love story with the mare begins: “The horse lived, like a fairytale princess, at the very end of the train line and up on top of the hill beyond the final station, only reachable by taxi or by bicycle … Only a person who wanted more than anything to find the horse would find her.” But there is nothing magical about the horse. She’s an ordinary mare, already middle-aged – 14 years old as the story begins. Nor will this be a tale about a gifted equestrian discovering her powers. The narrator is, and remains, a clumsy rider, and she spends as much time transporting hay and scooping manure as she does riding. A baffled friend comments: “So you pay to clean up someone else’s horse’s shit?” So much for fairytales.
Yet we do feel the stable as a mythical realm, and the women there – they are all women – as a secret Freemasonry in possession of an ancient wisdom. “There are almost fifty horses here, each attached to their own human female. Walking onto the yard, there is nothing to see but horses and women, women washing feed bowls, women sweeping, women hosing buckets, women pushing wheelbarrows, women carrying haynets and bags of woodchips and bins of chaff.” The feeling is not just of work but ritual. The horses are equivocal, enigmatic beings: massive beasts that can effortlessly kill you, but also dependent creatures who will die if the beets in their feed aren’t properly soaked. The mare is childless, as all these horses are childless; it’s impossible to know if this troubles them. The narrator reflects: “The horse and I are both grown women but the relationship between our sizes is this: if I got on my hands and knees, I could be her foal.” But does the horse feel anything for her? The narrator is in constant intimate relation with the mare’s body, but can’t begin to fathom her mind.
At one point, the narrator thinks of the notes she is making: “What I wanted was a non-structured, non-linear, non-narrative, a collection of impressions belonging to the continuous present.” While Mare does become a story, its power is reliant on moments, thoughts, vignettes; on the everyday illuminated by the intensity of once-in-a-lifetime feeling. It is grand and particular; lovably modest and impressively profound. Readers may be reminded of animal memoirs such as Raising Hare and H Is for Hawk, but there is an uncertainty here that feels native to fiction. Does anything here belong to us? What is going on in others’ heads? Do we even have a future? We have no means of knowing. But if there is a mystical wisdom of women, it is in the mucking out and the soaking of feed, in that continuous present where love is arduous and unasked for and unrewarded, but also the shape of the real.
Mare by Emily Haworth-Booth is published by Granta (£16.99). To support the Guardian, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
