As Pell secretly saddles up her horse, Jack, and disappears into the darkness on the night before her wedding, you will be swept away with her, riding along through the forests and moors of England.
Growing Up in Nomansland
Pell's childhood in Nomansland, a fictitious place wedged somewhere in between the English counties of Hampshire and Wiltshire, has been bleak. She and her siblings were born into a crumbling bare cottage, ill-built by their useless and uncaring preacher father whose sermons are very much preoccupied with the damnation of the sinful, while he is secretly living a double-life himself. Pell's mother, emptied of all spirit, is ruined by the long chain of childbirths and deaths of her joyless motherhood. After Pell's brothers die of 'fever',the children are on their own. Neither their drunken father, nor their melancholy mother care to support them.
Horses
Pell's only joy are horses. She can shoe a horse as 'any grown man. Unlike them, she could see through the skin of a horse, through the thick bony skull to its brain, or deep into its chest where resided the heart and soul. She could tell at a glance what a horse could do, or might do if asked nicely, and how to ask so that the answer was always yes'. When riding, she feels free, feraless and powerful. Animals play as prominent a role as humans in Rossof's tale. Pell is in perfect harmony with wild creatures and communicates with them more naturally than she does with people.
Marriage Proposal
When Pell's childhood friend and fellow rider Birdie asks her to marry him, Pell is torn. Pulled in one direction by familial loyalty and the deeply rooted tradition of the womanly duty and her individual desire to be free of social constraints and independent of male control in another. Pell foresees her not-so-bright future as Birdie cheerfully announces his plans for houseful of children. Her mother, after all, is a typical sight of a woman ruined by drudgery and ceaseless pregnancies.
Escape
And so Pell sets out on her journey with her horse Jack and her adopted brother Bean. Mute Bean, a by-product of Pell's father's random sexual encounter, is as wild and unsettled as Pell. They head for the horse fair on Salisbury Plain in the hope that Pell's horse-taming talent would earn her an independent living. Pell thus embarks on an adventure that proves to be also a spiritual journey. The sense of constant motion is with the reader from the outset of the novel, enhanced by the rhythmic flow of beautifully crafted narrative. The narrative is woven into a pattern of continually intersecting and parting paths of the characters.
Revenge of a Stranger
As she struggles to survive, Pell is drawn to the society's outcasts and misfits. A fateful encounter with a gypsy woman Esther at Salisbury fair will bring tragedy to the family Pell had left behind in her native village. As she learns that there is a heavy price to pay for her independence, she also experiences new, unexpected feelings. Crossing paths with a sinister poacher, nicknamed Dogman, transforms her from a girl into a woman.
Meg Rosoff's novel is a deceit. A book of modest size, thinner than your average chick lit book, it conceals a timeless epic. At its core lies a universal human experience, the quest for freedom and one's place in the world. Rosoff's writing is condensed but elegant. Raw lyricism, especially in passages describing landscape and behaviour of horses is hypnotic. So much so that the reader is thrown from his armchair right onto the horseback.
Published by Penguin,186 pages
Zuzana Minarikova - I live in London and work in publishing in Bloomsbury which is an exciting part of London, full of museums, galleries, bookshops and ...
