National Velvet by Enid Bagnold

The second horse book I read for A Century of Books was National Velvet (my 1935 book). I didn’t set out to read two horse books, like I didn’t set out to read two holiday books or two travels in mid-twentieth-century in Europe. I find it hard to believe I have never read National Velvet before; however, I did realize why once I picked it up and started reading it. But I wanted to understand why it was considered a classic and has been reprinted so many times. I honestly could hardly make it through to the end. I was interested in what the outcome would be but it took so long to get there!

I know Enid Bagnold had a huge reputation and following, but I don’t see it. Maybe because I was never inclined to read horse books. I found reading her to be mighty tedious and overwrought. I found the way she wrote the dialect to be extremely annoying. I found everything about it to be implausible except for maybe the relationship between the mother and Velvet.  Maybe I just was not prepared for the book to be about an almost completely dysfunctional family. I certainly cannot understand and still don’t get how each of the girls had never ridden a horse except possibly the old cart horse they used to take away the meat from their father’s butcher shop, yet they could get on the horses they received in implausible ways and ride them well enough to ride in gymkhanas.

If, somehow you’ve lived your life as a reader without ever hearing of National Velvet or Enid Bagnold, then try to forget that you just heard it. Or if you have to know what it’s about, try this description from Amazon: “A 14-year-old English girl wins a horse in a raffle, trains it, and rides it in the Grand National steeplechase.” I hardly think that is what it’s about. The amount of time taken up by that description and the book is probably less than 1/20th of the book.

Others say the book is about strong women who do something mighty and this is true about the mother and maybe Velvet. However, they both seem to be not unwilling, but not active themselves toward goals. The mother was pushed into swimming the English Channel by a man and had a moment of fame, and Velvet feels that the horse is the one in charge, not her. The sisters are just a bunch of, I don’t know how to describe them as they just seem to have strange interests like canaries. So I think to say this feminist book is not really true.

At times it almost seems so unlikely and incongruous to be magical realism. Maybe if I had read it in that spirit, it would have been better. But definitely do not rush to read it unless you have a life-long goal of reading every horse book ever written.