Rosalind Belben

This is a complex little book about love and death. An Italian seaman and a very repressed upper class English woman are awaiting her death. Their love must negotiate many chasms between them: culture, class, age, sensual disparities, and more.
The narrative is in short chunks, jumping in time from her childhood to his life after her death to the present moments in her hospital bed, and it is mostly stream of consciousness----sometimes hers and sometimes his.
At the level of individual sentences, there are some very evocative moments. At the level of an overall plot, it is simple; she dies.
Along the way we are given enough to infer much without being told directly---her childhood, his rawness, their sexual problems, hear illness, etc.
Very interesting book that, despite its relative brevity, is a slow and careful read.… (mais)

Our Horses in Egypt is a wonderfully strange work. Certainly it's a novel and while it's set is a very specific (as well as fairly obscure) historical situation, it's not a historical novel at all. Rather it's a somewhat suppressed or disguised meditation on the relationship of humans and their animals, and what we make them do and then what happens to them, and to us.

Rosalind Belben here works in the area of horses drafted into WWI, a subject I had never thought about, although I was aware there were mounted officers and dray horses and more in that war. All is thus strange in the account of the call for horses to go to war, the drafting of them after inspection teams have made their determinations, the sadness of the owners who feel connected to them, and then – Belben's great story of what happened after the war to one of them, Philomena.

Belben is able to imagine what Philomena and a few other horses around her might have registered along the way, and to put it down in a way that curiously resembles free indirect discourse, with the narrative representing Philomena's impressions without suggesting she is thinking in a human sense. This fluid narrative must have been hard to write as it could easily have failed and instead is a lovely example of literary empathy.

Nothing can be said about the plot without risking the reader's experience, so I'll just mention that among its pleasures are scenes of English country life at home and English expatriates abroad, worthy of E.M. Forster's perceptive, delicate, sympathetic, and very amusing, scenes.

The reader also finds a stirring historical situation, and a deeply affecting personal one. And of course the well-worn expression "war horse" will never be the same after experiencing Rosalind Belben's Our Horses in Egypt.


… (mais)

A lot going on here, and it takes a while to get in to. There are two stands of narrative; the experiences of the English horse Philomena plucked from the gentle English countryside and thrown into the full horror of the North African campaign and her former owner Griselda Romney, Egypt bound to try to rescue her from a life of post war servitude. Overall, Philomena's narrative is more engaging, although for a non horse person like myself the language and rituals of horse maintenance took some deciphering (what on earth is tibbin?). Its worth it though; we are used to reading about the privations of soldiers during the First World War, even if the North African front has not been covered in anywhere near as much detail as the Western Front. We are used to reading of the incompetence and callousness of officers to their men. The sufferings of the animals are less well known, and the war from Philomena's POV is revelatory and heart breaking as are her sufferings post war
Griselda's narrative is less successful. The narrative voice is clipped and sparse, and it requires some effort from the reader to get into the rhythm of the language. No problem with that, but I was constantly left with the impression that there where things going on "off stage" which the reserved (and no doubt authentic) linguistic style was hiding from me. What is it she'd done in the past that made Maltese society so ill disposed to receiving her? What exactly is she is supposed to have done on board ship the crew that get her removed from the ship to Egypt. Simple conversation? In which case why are her legs described as being "in the air". What exactly is going on in Cairo with Imran? Can she really be as silly and self absorbed as she seems? And why on earth does the faithful Nanny encourage her in her foolishness? Is Griselda really searching for Philomena or searching for something else, in which case what?

Despite coming out of the Griselda narrative stream with a faint feeling of dissatisfaction, none the less it is entertaining, funny in parts, and holds your attention. And to be honest Philomena's narrative is enough reason to buy the book on its own… (mais)

World War I widow Griselda Romney begins a quest for her horse Philomena, one of thousands of English horses requisitioned into service by the War Office and then sold into service to spare the expense of transport home. One strand of narrative follows Griselda as she travels from England to Cairo with young daughter and nanny in tow; the other presents Philomena's war experience. Despite the dense technical horse-related lingo and wartime abbreviations, I was gripped by Philomena's experiences of hardship and companionship. I found Griselda's narcissistic character lacking in compassion (except for horses) and any desire to understand the world around her.… (mais)