Jane Smiley's ninth novel is long and complicated. It has a very large cast and a very loose plot. The latter concerns the horses, and their entourages - owners, trainers, jockeys, and their friends and families - who will run in a prestigious race, The Breeder's Cup, in November 1999. The novel dips in and out of the lives of these characters from November 1997 until just after the big race. In the course of telling their stories, many of the standard themes of fiction - love, money, marriage - are dealt with. Corruption rears its familiar head, charging the tension as the Breeder's Cup approaches. But it is the relationship of people with horses which is the main theme of the novel.
It's not just about people liking horses, as in children's pony books , although love of the horse is certainly the most common emotion (there is only one nasty horse in the novel, a frisky bully, Epic Steam, who is brought to book by a herd of bossy brood mares). It's also about how people resemble horses, and horses people. This may not come as a revelation to anyone who lives in close proximity to animals, but in this urban world, who does? Humorously, with a light and convincing touch, Jane Smiley reminds us that we, too, are large mammals.
Keeping track of the many characters is not easy, but there is a cast list at the start of the book which helps, if you have the patience to refer to it. As the novel develops, a few people and horses pull to the front - Rosalind Maybrick, a thoroughbred wife who looks "like a beach in the Caribbean " emerges as the human heroine. "Justa Bob`' is the most appealing horse, but oddly enough the most interesting character in the novel is a dog, a horrible Jack Russell named Eileen. If you ever wondered about the etymology of the insult "bitch", getting to know Eileen will be enlightening.
While these characters draw ahead of the bunch, others simply fade away or disappear. Sometimes one wonders why they were introduced at all - this quibble does not refer to the funny cameo roles played by the woman with a handbag addressed as "Your Majesty", who appears at a party, or the Irish writer "making the most of her artistic status" wandering into a Dublin hotel. But why do we get a detailed introduction to the Icelandic horse-owner, Hakon, who stays in the novel for three pages and then, to use that convenient phrase of Icelandic-saga-writers, "is now out of the story"?
Quite a few characters are out of Smiley's story by the time the Breeder's Cup occurs. And those that capture our attention we get to know from the outside: we discover their "form", their genealogies, physiques and actions, but seldom delve deeply into their innermost feelings. Smiley's technique is more epic than romantic.
And that, more than the highly specialised subject matter, is the most surprising aspect of this work. Smiley has departed radically from the fiction templates with which we are familiar, of realism and modernism and everything else. (I hesitate to add "post-modernism", since I'm never sure what post-modernism actually is). She breaks all the rules: messy structure, too many characters, too many stories, loose ends all over the place.
Writing this novel must have been a gamble. But Smiley has won! Something pulls the whole concoction together. Talent or skill, or love? Is it genius? Whatever it is, the result is original and extraordinary: a wise and wonderful novel, bubbling over with all the joyful exuberance of an opera by Mozart. Horse Heaven is that rare thing: a book of pure delight.
Eilis Ni Dhuibhne is a writer. Her most recent novel is The Dancers Dancing