You are a young man born into a very long, distinguished line. Now, you are neither nigger, nor woman, nor stupid. JOHN HENRY: “…real knowledge begins with knowing your place in the world. The protagonist is a boy, Henry, the only child of a Kentucky landowner who is set to inherit not only status, land and material wealth, but also an unshakeable respect for his lineage. And so the good news is that The Sport of Kings is sublimely written, and the storytelling achingly beautiful. For the reader to happily wallow in verbose description, the writing has to be special. The strategy is sound but for such an approach to pay-off, the prose has to compensate. And to ‘see’ a thoroughbred horse up-close – its mane, its velvet hide and sinew. And so to acclimatise, the pace of the story is offset and we, the reader, are invited to immerse ourselves – to experience harvest, and cider making, and hog killing. Morgan does not want her characters judged through a modern lens – rather, she wants us to see the racist father as more than a sum of racist parts and to appreciate the context in which a loving mother, married into one of the oldest and richest land-owning families in the State, also has illicit sex with a bonded labourer – a black man. This is deliberate – the author has focussed not on action but immersion, embedding the reader in the place and time in which the story is set: Kentucky, in the South of the United States, circa 1950s. Morgan thudded through my letterbox, weighing in at 500-plus oversized pages, I gulped.īeyond the imposing size, another rule-bending contrast soon surfaces – the pace of the evolving story is at a crawl.
Indeed, unless your name is Leo Tolstoy, you just don’t write 150,000 word novels anymore. And this lack of patience, the compacted timeframes within which we operate, infects everything – from our love lives to our careers, to how we read. Whatever we consume or experience, we demand near-immediate return – else we move on. When one is cognisant of sand slipping through one’s hands, time becomes precious. Well, it’s a point of view… Certainly the pace of things – with days, weeks, even years whizzing past – somehow it does feel unprecedented.
‘ Modern Life is Rubbish’ opined Blur, the British indie rock band, back in 1993.
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