Twelve-year-old Leopold Sercombe lives on the Devon-Somerset border with his family, all of whom are employed on the local country estate. Leo spends his days trying to avoid school, preferring to work with his father and brother. When he meets Charlotte, daughter of the landowner, the two discover a mutual passion for horses that transcends class distinctions, and they embark on a clandestine friendship that threatens the Sercombes’ way of life. From January 1911 to June 1912, The Horseman immerses the reader in Leo’s world in a novel that is as moving and profound as it is evocative of the landscape and period.
The Horseman is Tim Pears’s ninth novel, following acclaimed fiction including In the Place of Fallen Leaves, Landed and In a Land of Plenty. It is the first in a planned trilogy, and his focus here is on the working-class men and women who support the estate – farm labourers, kitchen maids, stable boys.
His portrayal of their work has an understated dignity. He neither elevates them to hero status nor belittles their endeavours. These are robust, hard-working, occasionally frustrated characters who live and breathe the rural life into which they’ve been born. Leo’s mother, Ruth, can read and is demonstrably shrewder than her husband, and yet “they had… one wooden armchair. His father’s. Mother used it if he was out. Now she rose, relinquished the chair to him, shifted the kettle on to the hotplate.” Throughout the novel, Pears conveys complex relationships – between master and servant, parent and child, brother and sister – with a lightness of touch.
It’s a pastoral novel but also muscular and, at times, brutal: “His mouth was full of blood. He opened his lips and the blood poured out. He could hear groaning. He realised it came from himself.” This is a hard world – seen in the killing and preparing of the family pig, the breaking in of horses, the trampling to death of a farm labourer by cows. Pears writes these episodes with intricate detail, suffusing them with sensitivity and immediacy.
His prose is luminous, drawing in the reader: “The air was cold and clear. There were skeins of mist in the low fields that were like the breath of the land made visible, like his own.”
The Horseman can be seen as a tripartite love story: Leo’s love for the horses, his love for Charlotte, his love for the landscape: “He might have been the first human upon the earth, striding through the garden. He doubted there were any places so beautiful in all the planets known or unknown to man, or to God.”
A scene in which Leo grooms one of his father’s horses is as delicately portrayed as any love scene. The novel’s bittersweet ending is shot through with a quiet tragedy and muted optimism that feels infused with love.
Pears’s fiction has been likened to Thomas Hardy’s, and the comparison is apposite. As a coming-of-age novel, The Horseman is wise and insightful. As a love story, it is moving and sincere. And as a portrayal of rural Edwardian England, it is powerful, vivid and humane.
• The Horseman by Tim Pears is published by Bloomsbury (£16.99). To order a copy for £14.44 go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99
