Readers Up #18: The Scorpio Races

Horses are a staple of speculative fiction; iconic author Judith Tarr has an entire column devoted to the fact. They appear as fairy mounts and sometimes fairies themselves, as soul-bonded Companions to mages, as demonic harbingers and heralds of the sun, as warrior steeds for paladins and kings. There is always a filly who cannot be ridden by anyone except the Hero, or a stallion tamed solely by the Ingenue. There is always a journey for gods or nations, undertaken by horse and human, which no one else can complete. There is always a horse.

Maggie Stiefvater’s Printz Award-winning and very horse-hearted The Scorpio Races lives between realms, literarily speaking: there are rattling cars and boater hats and telephones, and there are old gods and human sacrifice and vicious water horses. The murky recent-past time period, not-quite-Ireland setting, and lethal use of real-world detail combine with the old blood of Scots-Irish myth to produce a dreamlike atmosphere, a world where the stunning fantasy creatures on the page feel poised to leap into reality. Contemporary fantasy and magical realism rely on the preternatural to heighten the realistic. It’s difficult to read, say, Natalie Voss’s recent analysis of how humans depict and perceive racehorse breakdown without straying into the realm of the fantastic. Humans tend to project themselves onto beings or objects unable to speak, to reach for the numinous for explanations when the mundane grows too painful. Anthropomorphic animals are the bread and butter of children’s literature--and remain a staple of adult discourse around human-animal relationships. From this angle, far from being escapist, the most incisive fantasy has much to say about the contemporary human world. Our current iteration of racing is trapped inside its own dream. 

At the top of the chalkboard it says JOCKEYS and then, to the right, CAPAILL. Someone has written 'meat' in small letters next to JOCKEYS.

The Scorpio Races does not feature Thoroughbreds, but it belongs to the category of racetrack literature nonetheless (its Library of Congress subject headings even include “Racing -- Fiction”). Where Eclipse’s descendants do appear, they are off-set, foils for the monstrous capaill uisce populating the island of Thisby. They are mentioned vaguely, mainland runners whose efforts fail to captivate protagonist Sean Kendrick; their fabled blood is thin compared to the water horses, who are occasionally bred to promising Thoroughbreds by canny breeders in order to produce a stronger sport horse. The Thoroughbred, prince of real-world horse breeds, is a non-starter on Thisby. The idea of running a warmblood against a seething pack of capaill, as protagonist Puck Connolly intends to do, is laughable. She and her mare are meat, far more so than the typical jockeys of the island’s November racing festival.

I initially read The Scorpio Races when it was published in 2011, as a general fan of Stiefvater’s ouvre--and before the fever of horse racing fandom had set in. Reading it now, from the perspective of someone entrenched in this corner of equine sport, is a wholly different experience; reading it as someone particularly interested in jockeys is even more rewarding. The race scenes, from both Sean and Puck’s perspectives, often read like snips from Ride to Win or other volumes devoted to the jock’s-eye view of their sport. Just a horse lover, Sean tells a prospective American buyer after absolutely smoking another rider on the gallops. Only half of racing is how fast your horse is. The author layers in details specific to Thoroughbred sport, subtly but lovingly acknowledged: Sean teaches Puck to handicap her fellow riders, in so many words; Corr, Sean’s wicked-fast capall, is drawn the way I would describe any horse that stalks the pace; together the two protagonists devise a plan for sweeping the race that would put any Ortiz-brothers conspiracy theorist to shame. For a fantasy-obsessed girl who became a woman fanatical for racing, there are few books more satisfying. For a flagrant jock apologist, there are certainly few books--fantasy or realist, fiction or non--that pay as much attention to the riders’ physical and cultural space in their sport.

We love our horses is a common refrain, an anodyne rallying cry to some and likely the Band-Aid Baffert should have mentioned. We love our jockeys is a chorus you hear only occasionally, on PDJF Day or when a rider is catastrophically injured along with their horse. Perhaps this is due to jockey humanity, the idea that a human being can opt into danger and has choices about their life trajectory, where an animal cannot. The other side of this coin, of course, is that the Powers That Be are often loath to permit riders’ voices outside of and above codified talking points; if a racehorse “loves to run,” a jockey is “pound for pound the strongest athlete in the world.” Fin. Jocks are talked about as racehorses are, knights on the sporting chessboard, ciphers for politicking sometimes, useful scapegoats often, and actors in their own right rarely. It’s a given within the sport that the riders must risk their lives. It no longer seems to be a given, for anyone, that the horses must risk theirs. Drew Magary wrote in a recent Vice article that playing in the NFL is a temp gig, and more to the point, that the mentality of temping (or its contemporary bastard son the gig economy) is trenchant. The physical brain of an NFL player or jockey may be affected by violence, forever. The logical brain of any gig athlete is shaped by necessity, by enforced and circuitous precarity, by dangerous health fads and broken economies repackaged as the hustle and the grind. The metaphorical brain of horse racing has been molded, by historic norms and contemporary handwashing, to measure jockey lives with a rubric.

It is the first day of November, reads the opening line of Stiefvater's novel, and so, today, someone will die. Death on Thisby is received as daily bread. The island's jockeys are amateurs in the classic sense, men who live and die for the horse and then--if they're lucky that year--go home to their shop-keeping and auto-tuning responsibilities. No professional jockeys feature, although as token American George Holly points out, Sean is only masquerading as an amateur. He's a Jerry Bailey (with the looks, I suppose, of Donnacha O'Brien) in a race for Cal Shillings. He's concerned not with the erosive attrition of making weight and scoring mounts but with bites and drowning. Yet his relationship with Corr is familiar to any reader who has loved a horse, whether their own or a famous name... and is keenly topical to racing's ongoing conversation around breakdown, euthanasia, and even overseas stallion sales. Zero fatalities at any track, on any day, in any race from a $15,000 claimer to the Breeders' Cup Classic, is not a useful set of goalposts. The question is whether racing will continue as a bloodsport, sacrificing to outdated models, false gods, and indefensible ethics, or wake from its dream.

Yours along the shore (of Jamaica Bay),
Diana

PS: The Scorpio Races, naturally, is available from libraries and bookstores… but you can also read my take on carnivorous water ponies here and here.