A Stable Relationship

A paean to the horse, our ambassador between the wild and the civilized.

HORSE

How the Horse Has Shaped Civilizations

by J. Edward Chamberlin

BlueBridge. 282 pp. $24.95

Owning horses is not generally considered a rational thing to do. They are expensive, fragile and complicated (not to mention dangerous), but irrational horse lovers persist in riding them, racing them, driving them, paying for them and pondering them. Writing about horses is not an especially rational thing to do, either. It is always difficult to negotiate the boundary between the audience that is interested but not knowledgeable and the audience that is knowledgeable but also dogmatic. Most horse books are, therefore, manuals for the knowledgeable or novels for the merely interested, and in many, humans and their concerns take over the story while the horses remain mysterious and iconic.

In Horse , Canadian author J. Edward Chamberlin attempts the impossible -- to bridge the gap between horsey and non-horsey readers, and to evoke and explore the mystery of this utterly familiar and yet utterly elusive quadruped. What Chamberlin, a professor of comparative literature at the University of Toronto, is most concerned with is a truly grand subject -- how the domestication of horses shaped the spread of human settlement around the globe while simultaneously modifying human consciousness. As the horse slips out of general usefulness, the relationship of its identity to ours is changing, no doubt forever. Chamberlin wants to recapture that historic relationship before it is gone. His book is thus neither a novel nor a manual, but a philosophical history and a lyrical essay.

He begins in the 1930s, in Alberta ranch country, with a mare, Big Bird, who lives as if in the wild, but is not native to her home. Like all North American horses, she is the descendant of European breeds -- in her case, Percheron, a French draft breed, and Andalusian, a Spanish cavalry breed. She is big, gray, self-confident and good-looking. Her life epitomizes not only the heritage of horses in North America, but also the uneasy connection between her owner, who is a Native American from the Dunne-za band, and her eventual buyer, a ranch-owner of European descent. It is this mutual dependence and distrust between roaming bands of what Chamberlin calls "barbarian" horsemen and "civilized" agriculture-based cities that is most paradoxical and fascinating about human and horse history, whether it plays out in Alberta or Mongolia, Hungary or Turkey.

Though a horseman himself, Chamberlin gives us almost nothing of his own experience, no doubt consciously avoiding the manual genre of horse books. What he offers on this score is an overview of equestrian theories, showing that there seem to have always been two theories of how one is to ride, where one sits on the horse, and how one uses the bridle. Upright has always alternated with forward, heavy has always alternated with fast. Civilization preferred heavy and upright until various barbarian hordes proved with deadly raids that light and fast was the way to win.

In all horse-riding cultures, horses have been prized for how they convey the wealth and style of their owners: a French cavalry parade, a great Roman chariot race, a promenade of carriages and riders around Hyde Park had their counterpart in Siberian "tombs from the third century BCE in which horses were buried with felt masks and head dresses on" or a parade at the first Calgary Stampede in 1912 of the Blackfoot tribe "in full regalia . . . with their best blankets and saddles and bridles and breech bands."

Chamberlin is especially eloquent on the paradox of the horse as a domestic animal that both works submissively for humans and also represents wildness. As his theory of horse domestication goes, when humans and horses shared the habitat they were best adapted to -- temperate grassland savannah -- humans hunted horses. When the savannahs were replaced by less habitable (for horses) forests, humans saved horses by putting them to work and discovered all the many ways that horses could expand human horizons. But because horses live domestically, in stables and fields, and wildly, in remote canyons and on vast plains, "they embody the in-between, not only in between wandering and settling down but also in between the fenced and the free," symbolizing the ever-present longing and fear of civilization to fit once again into the natural world.

As what a friend of mine calls "a bona fide horse degenerate," I, of course, have some quibbles about Horse -- too much lyricism and not enough how-to probably sums it up. I would have liked him to dispense with some of the symbolism and give me his own down-to-earth theory (with examples) of how he thinks horses perceive the world. Or maybe some anecdotes relating his adventures as a boy with Big Bird's colt.

But the world is full of those sorts of books, and Chamberlin has tried something more ambitious and sweeping. While Horse is not as detailed and informative as I might wish for, it is well worth reading for the way Chamberlin builds his argument and his energy, and for the way that, yes, even rational humans who might never buy a horse or watch a horse race might be brought to appreciate what horses have done for us and meant to us for thousands of years. ·

Jane Smiley has written three books about horses, including the novel "Horse Heaven."