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When Robey Childs's mother has a premonition about her husband, a soldier fighting in the Civil War, she does the unthinkable: she instructs her only child to find his father on the battlefield and bring him home.
At fourteen, wearing the coat his mother sewed to ensure his safety—blue on one side, gray on the other—Robey thinks he is off on a great adventure. But not far from home, his horse falters and he realizes the enormity of his task. It takes the gift of a powerful and noble coal black horse to show him how to undertake the most important journey of his life: with boldnesss, bravery, and self-possession.
Yet even that horse is no match for the brutality and senselessness of war, no surrogate for the courage Robey needs to summon in its face. It's in the center of that landscape, as witness to the lawlessness and carnage around him, that he is forced to raise a gun for the first time in his life. When he returns to his mother, Robey Childs will be the best a man can be, and the worst, irrevocably scarred by all he has seen—and all he has done.
When Robert Olmstead published his debut, River Dogs, he was compared to Richard Ford, Raymond Carver, Thomas McGuane. Since that time, Olmstead has received high praise for all of his work. But it's this book that is destined to become a classic. Coal Black Horse joins the pantheon of great war novels—All Quiet on the Western Front, The Red Badge of Courage, The Naked and the Dead.
Review:
"To the steady drumbeat of powerful Civil War novels that continue to arrive, you must add 'Coal Black Horse.' Here, distilled into just 200 pages, is the story of how a young man and a young nation lost their innocence. With his lush, incantatory voice, Robert Olmstead describes a boy thrust into one of the war's most horrific moments. In the opening pages, 14-year-old Robey Childs is... Washington Post Book Review (read the entire Washington Post review) called into the house by his clairvoyant mother. It's May 1863, and she perceives that the Civil War has reached a crisis. 'Go and find your father,' she tells him, 'and bring him back to his home.' Their interest in the conflict is entirely nonpartisan. With a reversible blue/gray jacket and strict instructions to shoot first, Robey begins an arduous journey across territory rife with soldiers, gangs and refugees. In Hollywood parlance, this is 'Jim the Boy' climbs 'Cold Mountain,' and surely young stallions are already lining up to play Robey in the inevitable movie. 'He walked a shambling gait, his knees to and fro and his shoulders rocking,' Olmstead writes. 'His hands were already a man's hands, cut square, with tapering fingers, and his hair hung loose to his shoulders. He was a boy whose mature body would be taller yet and of late he'd been experiencing frightening spurts of growth. On one night alone he grew an entire inch and when morning came he felt stretched and his body ached and he cried out when he sat up.' A neighbor gives him the coal black horse of the title — 'an oncommon horse,' Robey notes — and he sets off toward the latest news of battle, stealing food when he's hungry and sleeping as little as possible. Almost all his encounters with others are disturbing or violent — frequently both. He's captured by Union soldiers just before an attack by raiders, and from the first shot it's a spectacular scene, chaotic and deafening, striking for the sheer oddness of the ways in which people's bodies are torn apart in war. As he escapes, Robey sees 'the men in blue where they'd been carted and strewn for burial and the sight of them was as eerie as drowned fish.' This is just a prelude to Gettysburg, where he hopes to find his father. We don't see the battle itself — it's ended when Robey arrives — but his experience of the aftermath will haunt anyone who reads these pages. Beyond the impact of so much death is the unimaginable horror of this vast field covered with men who are not yet dead, 'men who lay on the bare ground, moaning and twitching fitfully, blubbering in wave and cadence. They were left wholly to themselves.' Olmstead sweeps from the enormity of the battle to searing little moments, rendered in incongruous poetry: 'A white horse, its forelegs shot off, lay on its side calmly cropping the tufted and trampled rye.' In the heat of such carnage, despite his youth, Robey must find the courage to save those depending on him and kill those who would do him harm. 'Coal Black Horse' shares some apocalyptic similarities with Cormac McCarthy's 'The Road,' and as with that chilling masterpiece, one almost hesitates to interrupt the chorus of praise that has already greeted this book to point out some annoying flaws. We might accept Robey's easy success at finding his father among 50,000 casualties, but that reunion is compounded by several more unlikely reunions, as though the whole state of Pennsylvania were reduced to half-a-dozen people. More troubling are flashes of pretension that mar Olmstead's prose. The book's epigraph comes from Job, and the voice of God seems to keep butting in throughout the story. Even during gorgeous and moving passages, we have to stumble over declarations such as this: 'They were a teaching father and a learning son, timeless in their existence, the father born into the son as is the grandfather and the father before him and all the way back to the first. The father's life is foreclosed and the son's life is continuing and as always, only the unknown privileging one state of being over the other.' We're told of 'lessons as old as the history of the sun.' When his mother speaks, 'Her words were as if come through time and she was an old mother and the ancient woman.' 'Coal Black Horse' doesn't need these flourishes of profundity nor the harping on Robey's momentous transition from Boy to Man. The story conveys all this more powerfully than any of Olmstead's pronouncements. Like Robey, he should just keep it simple and trust his instincts. Ron Charles is a senior editor of The Washington Post Book World." Reviewed by Rajiv ChandrasekaranRachel Hartigan SheaMarina WarnerCarrie SheffieldMichael MewshawDavid TreuerMichael DirdaJonathan YardleyRobert MalleyRon Charles, Washington Post Book World (Copyright 2006 Washington Post Book World Service/Washington Post Writers Group)
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Synopsis:
When 14-year-old Robey Child is sent by his mother to search for his father, a doomed soldier, he witnesses the horrors of war both on and off the battlefield. Riding a talismanic coal black horse, he embarks upon a life-altering journey that will challenge him physically, emotionally, and spiritually.
Robert Olmstead is the author of five previous books (River Dogs, Soft Water, A Trail of Heart’s Blood Wherever We Go, America by Land, and Stay Here with Me). The recipient of a Guggenheim fellowship and an NEA grant, he is a professor at Ohio Wesleyan University.
barbarajmayer, May 23, 2007 (view all comments by barbarajmayer)
Coal Black Horse is one of the most powerful Civil War books I've read. This book has everything -- it's a coming of age story, a war story, a horse story, and the chronicle of a young man's quest for his father. The language is poetic and gripping; scenes unfold with an intensity that haunts the reader long after the last page is turned. I recommend this book to anyone who is interested in Civil War history as well as to those who are fascinated by the close bond that sometimes develops between animals and humans when each must depend on the other for survival.
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xani, May 14, 2007 (view all comments by xani)
The novel, The Coal Black Horse by Robert Olmstead is filled with symbolism. The book centers on Robey Child who symbolizes the loss of innocence that forces both children and adults, to pay with a part of their soul to survive. Robey represents the child in all society - a society that is not prepared for the gruesome nature of war nor the effects that will last long after the war has ended. The horse is coal black, devoid of any color, contrasting with Robey who is wearing a jacket that is both blue and gray representing both sides of the civil war. Robey sees the carnage, death, and destruction that has taken the toll on both sides of the war, where devastation knows no winner or loser. Riding the coal black horse, Robey is given a higher vantage point to view the war that unfolds around him. Without the horse Robey struggles, a naive Child lost and unprepared to witness the carnage that unfolds around him as he searches for his father who is doomed to die on the Gettysburg battlefield.
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Product details
224 pages
Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill -
English9781565125216
Reviews:
"Synopsis"
by Libri,
When 14-year-old Robey Child is sent by his mother to search for his father, a doomed soldier, he witnesses the horrors of war both on and off the battlefield. Riding a talismanic coal black horse, he embarks upon a life-altering journey that will challenge him physically, emotionally, and spiritually.
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