Books
by Wayne Christeson
Winston Churchill, who suffered from depression throughout his life, famously said, “There is something about the outside of a horse that is good for the inside of a man.” Or a woman, too, according to author Jane Shilling in her charming new memoir, The Fox in the Cupboard (Touchstone, 328 pp.).
In 1999, Shilling, who is a regular contributor to The Times of London, found herself a single mom approaching middle age, with a vague dissatisfaction and a modest amount of time on her hands. She decided with no prior experience to take up horseback riding and, in particular, fox hunting. Shilling’s experiences encompassed the years during which efforts were being made in Parliament to ban fox hunting, something that ultimately happened last year and brought to an end a centuries-old tradition among keepers of horses and hounds.
Shilling’s take on the fox hunting ban is articulate but ambivalent. She writes convincingly of the sport’s antique history, which, as far as anyone can tell, began in the 14th century; and she tells stories of hunt clubs hundreds of years old, of legendary masters of the hunt and of a sport whose operational dialect is a form of 14th century Norman French. On the other hand, she recognizes both the natural brutality of the sport and the fact that everyone involved, from the hounds to the horses to the riders and the fox, are doing something they are born to do. She maintains that the hunters are not cruel but rather engaged in “an afternoon vignette of that most English paradox: a game of deadly seriousness.” In the end, she writes, she is happy for the fox if he escapes and happy for the hounds if he doesn’t.
It is clear above all that Shilling loves horses. She says, “Horses, if you let them, suck all the air out of your life until there is no room left to care for anything else.” The hunt requires almost obsessive discipline, from behavior and technique to dress and even hairstyle. But Shilling rides through it all with the self-effacing delight of a novice and a pure amateur. Her self-deprecation in the face of repeated embarrassments and near-disasters on the hunt is reminiscent of the wry confessions and reportorial style of John McPhee. Shilling can be very funny.
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The book is blessed with a practical glossary to help the uninitiated reader distinguish among such obscurities as the Master of the Hunt, the Master of the Hounds, the kennelman and something called the “whippers-in.” Shilling also draws apt connections to ancient stories like Gawain and the Green Knight, in which fox hunting serves as a critical plot device and metaphor. In the end, Shilling finds herself as a stronger and wiser person for the experience, with an enriched idea of people, animals and the natural world.