Just finished: Coal Black Horse, Robert Olmstead
I'm a sucker for a horse story. The titular character kept me reading Coal Black Horse, but I had a hard time appreciating the virtues of this Civil War novel due to the author's diction. Here's one example: "He walked a shambling gait, his knees to and fro and his shoulders rocking." Maybe someone should digitize this; I tried to visualize it and failed. (How do you "walk a gait"?) Here's another: "[Men] came and went; they ached and pained. They laughed privately and cried to themselves as if heeding a way-off silent call. They were forever childish, sweet and convulsive. They heard sounds the way a dog heard. They were like the moon; they changed every eight days." American men. They were different in 1863.
The story gets underway when Robey Childs is sent off by his mother to bring his father back from the war. (It's unclear at first if they live in the south or the north.) Where, Robey asks, will I find him? Go south, go east, then go north, says his Delphic mother. All right, Robey says, and off he sets on a "cobby gray horse with pearly [?] eyes". A cob is a small, sturdy saddle horse, so why does such a horse break down before they get to the general store (which you'd think wouldn't be that far from home)? However, this circumstance does inspire the extremely generous store owner to give Robey a replacement horse, a coal-black "Hanovarian." (A quick search indicates that German warmbloods--or German coach horses as they were then called, a category including Hanoverians--were first imported into the United States in the 1880s, making Robey's coal-black "Hanovarian" an anachronism.) As a character, 14-year-old Robey has sleep-walked through his role thus far, for all the volition he's shown, but he's awake enough to feel inferior to his splendid new horse. As well he might. The horse saves his bacon more than once. There's a believable misfortune when the coal-black horse is stolen, followed by a miracle: the U.S. Army agrees to return his horse during a war involving cavalry.
Olmstead does better at penning scenes of violence. An attack on a train yard is described minutely, with the general chaos of battle providing a backdrop for the particular details of human and equine carnage. A desultory love story, on again, off again, is less successful, possibly due to the characters' speech, somehow laconic and mannered at the same time. The author is good at scenes involving unlikely actions brought on by desperation; these scenes almost verge on magical realism, but I wouldn't be surprised if they were historically accurate. And Robey's father, although briefly seen, believably gives meaning to Robey's mythic quest.
On the whole, though, the book is undercut by inexact or awkward writing: "women with green hides sewn to their feet" (ouch), "[h]e was not so intent on hiding as he was avoiding being seen" (and the difference between hiding and avoiding being seen is?), and "gaunt horses with pinch-nosed hackamoors that wrung their tails" (you tell me how it's possible for a hackamore to wring a horse's tail). Since I've never read anything by Olmstead before, I was glad to run across the story "Walking with Syd," a meditation on guns, dogs, death and suicide, which displays less vexing diction. "Walking with Syd" contains this true statement: "Children, or children-like people should not be allowed to name. It is no fault of theirs. They don't know all about names and how they mean...." In the context, that is exactly right.
