Book Group Report – War Horse by Michael Morpurgo
Just occasionally in our book group, we’ll read a children’s book – usually a classic – and War Horse will surely become a modern one. It begins:
My earliest memories are a confusion of hilly fields and dark, damp stables, and rats that scampered along the beams above my head. But I remember well enough the day of the horse sale. The terror of it stayed with me all my life.
I was not yet six months old, a gangling, leggy colt who had never been further than a few feet from his mother. We were parted that day in the terrible hubbub of the auction ring and I was never to see her again.
It’s typical of Morpurgo to have a feelgood ending, but to get there, Joey, as our young horse narrator is called, has to go through many hands before being reunited with his first rider, Albert, who had also gone to war. We all enjoyed the book, but it is written for children, and so much happens in few pages. I was sad when Topthorn, Joey’s later companion, died but Joey survives everything. In general, the horses were treated better than the men, someone commented. I would have liked maybe fewer owners spending longer with them rather than the hectic handing of the horses from one to the next. But it was an affecting story.
I’ve still not managed to see the play nor film – but I did read Will Rycroft’s memoir of being (primarily) Captain Stewart in the original London production – All Quiet on the West End Front. The challenges of the staging come alive in his book.
Source: School LIbrary.
One of the Boys by Daniel Magariel
This is a one sitting read. It’s about two teenaged brothers, a couple of years apart in age and their father. Their father is an arch manipulator, having destroyed his relationship with his wife, he is determined to take the boys and start a new life, manipulating them into agreeing to move from Kansas to New Mexico with him, that they’d won ‘the war’ against their mother as he frames it.
The story is narrated by the younger brother. None of the characters are ever named. Established in Albuquerque, the brothers go to school, the older one being a talented basketball player – but is left on the bench permanently after their father attacks the coach for not playing him. That’s one of the first seeds of rot that the boys see. The father’s job as a financial adviser is going down the drain working from home, and he replaces work with drugs increasingly requiring one of his boys to stay home to run things. He gets increasingly violent and ever-more manipulative. They realise he’d terrorised and beaten their mother too, and the older brother is saving up for them to escape back to her, but their father seems to anticipate their every step.
He is such a nasty piece of work. The whole way through this novella, you’re hoping the boys can get away somehow… As a portrait of parental abuse, it’s horribly realistic. I don’t think I would have picked it up, had it not been for the quote by George Saunders on the cover, who describes it as ‘darkly funny’. I saw little of that, but you have to admire the courage of the boys, and Magariel really does get into the young narrator’s head, his writing is spot on.
Source: own copy. Granta hardback, 168 pages. BUY in pbk at Blackwell’s or Amazon UK via my affiliate links.
Ice Cold by Andrea Maria Schenkel
Translated by Anthea Bell
Fitting in a German novella now for #germanlitmonth. I read Schenkel’s debut similarly back in 2021. The Murder Farm was based on a real case from the 1920s. Her second, published in 2007, (2009 in English translation), is similarly based on various cases of rape and murder around Munich in the 1930s. Again, this novel is written as a mix of true crime and narrative.
We begin with a document comdemning a German man to be executed. We then move to Kathie’s story, as she escapes her rural village family home to seek her fortune in Munich. She has dreams of working at Hofmayer’s, the haberdashery where her mother took her when she was smaller, but she’ll settle for being a maid for a bit. As for staying with her strait-laced cousin’s family, she’d rather bunk up with a friend. But jobs are few and far between, and she ends up sofa-surfing. She ends up though spending most of her time in a bar in the valley, Soller’s, with a crowd of boozy friends, and sometimes going off with a chap to one of the rooms… then she meets the ‘driver’, whom she rather falls for. He comes and goes and she pines for him, planning a dream future. Meanwhile, there is a predator at large. Young women and disappearing, usually on the country lanes, often on their bicycles. In between the chapters of Kathie’s story, we get transcripts of interviews with the missing womens’ families, and interviews with the suspect who usually confesses to the crime.
However, we all know that serial killers tend to get bolder and the rapist-murderer’s actions get nastier each time until he perpetrates a disgusting act that almost turned my stomach. Once read, you can’t unread it – such is the visceral, factual description in the text – translated with equally direct words by Bell. Schenkel shocks us increasingly, delving deep into the mind of the rapist-murderer.
I hated this novella as much as I appreciated the pared-back power of Schenkel’s writing! Not for the faint-hearted. Would I read more by her? Possibly…
Source: Own copy. Quercus paperback, 186 pages. BUY new/used at Amazon UK via my affiliate link (link will work although crossed through).
You’re the only other person I know who’s read the Magariel (I think)! I read and reviewed it back when it was released in 2017-ish, and remember also finding it a dark and sad read, but being impressed nonetheless. Not sure I’d go back to it, though.
I seem to remember Eric reviewed it, I’ll check back on yours now too. I won’t be re-reading it either, but the writing was very good.
Ah, yes, Eric is prolific!