It would be easy to imagine that a book by Geraldine Brooks entitled Horse, charting both the real and imagined story of Lexington, the greatest racehorse and sire in American history, might simply be a paean of praise for a truly extraordinary equine, and that for the horse lovers among us, that would be enough.

But Brooks, who has brought us so many complex and rich novels over the years – A Year of Wonders, the Pulitzer prize-winning March, People of the Book and Caleb’s Crossing – uses Lexington as the backbone of a multi-themed novel that segues from the past to the present. A cast of widely different characters connect to the great racehorse, while Brooks grapples head on with the thorny subject of racism, which surely remains one of the most troublesome aspects of American history and society.

Geraldine Brooks fleshes out all her characters.Credit:Randi Baird

How are all these parallel lives woven into the rich tapestry of this novel? The story begins in 2019, when Theo Northam, a PhD art history student, picks up an old oil painting of a racehorse from his neighbour’s rubbish pile. The woman, whose husband has recently died, provides an early sign of the discomforting undertow of Horse, as the Nigerian-born Theo, son of two diplomats, reflects on how the couple were made uncomfortable by the presence of a “black” man in their neighbourhood.

The short chapter leads us to Jess, an Australian-born osteologist with the Smithsonian Institute, who is asked by her director if she can locate the skeleton of a racehorse that an English academic is flying over to look at. Then, quicker than a five-furlong dash, we’re back in Kentucky in 1850, and the young slave known as Wakefield’s Jarret – his name changing throughout the book until he finally becomes himself, Jarret Lewis– is in charge of Dr Wakefield’s most temperamental mare, Alice Carneal, who is about to give birth to the bay foal that will rewrite the racing record books.

With some of the main characters now gathered up – Jarret’s father, a slave who has managed to buy his freedom from Dr Wakefield; the doctor’s daughter, whose interest in horses is as great as her father’s; and a host of other true historical figures such as painter Thomas J Scottand Richard Ten Broeck, owner of a massive racing operation – the book is off at a gallop. Later in the novel, other characters appear, including art dealer Martha Jackson (with artist Jackson Pollock making a guest appearance, painting what seems to be Blue Poles).

This is a bold book, and one in which Brooks explores some familiar territory, particularly the cultural divide between white and Native Americans seen in Caleb’s Crossing, inevitably raising the complex subject of cultural appropriation.

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As a white female writer in her 60s, Brooks’ two main subjects are imagined young black males, one from a disadvantaged background whose lifelong struggle is to become a free man, one from a wealthy, privileged background who has come to live in America with what will transpire to be a devastating lack of understanding of what it can mean to be black in that country.

However, while Brooks’ imagination fleshes out all her characters so that it is easy to fall into their worlds, it is perhaps because of the number of stories in the book the human relationships sometimes felt a little under-developed.

Pulsating underneath all the complexities of the novel lies Lexington’s life, intertwined forever with Jarret, who sees the two of them as prime specimens, worth more care from their owners than they have otherwise have received.

There is another layer overlying the factual and fictional triumphs and tragedies of the book – the sudden death of Brooks’ husband, writer Tony Horwitz, from cardiac arrest in May 2019. The novel, not unnaturally, was put to one side while Brooks dealt with her grief and learned to navigate life without her husband. Death is never far away in Horse, and the empathy with which Brooks writes of sudden bereavement is born, I suspect, not just of writing talent, but from lived experience.

Despite the many lives (imagined and real) and the eras travelled – slavery, the Civil War, emancipation, the ’70s and the “now” – Brooks is at her best when she is writing about horses, and specifically about the relationship between Jarret and Lexington. Her knowledge of horse physiology and psychology allows her to give their welfare and rights a voice as a sub-text that reminds us of how frequently these glorious animals are mistreated.

Jarret, watching the take-no-prisoners training methods of his father, develops a different mindset. When his gentle training methods allow the horse to develop into greatness, the relationship between them is without doubt the truest and most moving in the book. Meanwhile, a night-time flight away from the Civil War, and Lexington’s developing blindness are just two of the vignettes packed with emotion and action that bring to life this historical novel, reflecting the meticulous attention to detail and deftness of touch that are the hallmarks of Brooks’ writing.

Horse by Geraldine Brooks is published by Hachette, $39.99.

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