By Fakhry Asa’ad
Book title: The Sport of Kings
Author: C. E. Morgan
ISBN: 9780008173319
Publisher: Macmillan
Publication year: 2016
Price: RM69.99
“Real knowledge begins with knowing your place in the world.”
This powerful, epic work of macro fiction has all the makings of a classic novel.
I’ll be honest: At first, I could barely muster the interest to start reading it. Even though I love horse racing, but a 550-page book about horse racing? Made me think twice.
But “The Sport of Kings” is so much more than it appears to be: Beneath the surface, it’s a sweeping take on racism and classism in America.
It is not really a book about horses and racing, it is a book about race, class, bigotry, power and privilege and how those who have it and those who don’t fare over several decades in American History.
At the centre of the novel is the Forge family, one of Kentucky’s oldest and most powerful dynasties. As a young boy in the middle of the 20th century, Henry Forge is taught by his father that “man is the measure of all things” and that “real knowledge begins with knowing your place in the world”.
Much to his father’s chagrin, Henry is intent on altering his family’s legacy. He has greater ambitions than growing corn; instead, he becomes obsessed with breeding the next Secretariat (a legendary racehorse), and years later he enlists his daughter, Henrietta, to help.
Henry and Henrietta are each given entire sections of the book — and they’re fascinating characters. But there’s another key person at the heart of their story: Allmon Shaughnessy, the biracial groom Henrietta hires (without consulting her father) to help them with their horses.
By the time he was 17, Allmon is in jail, where he discovers the knack with horses that gets him hired on the Forges’ farm.
While the Forges have a deep history of wealth and racism, Allmon carries with him the wounds of being a poor black man in a country that seems hellbent on tearing him down.
Inevitably, they converge in a myriad of complex ways that build to a tragic ending.
“The Sport of Kings” isn’t a quick, easy read. It’s dense, demanding and it requires a significant investment — and yet it’s ceaselessly compelling.
Morgan is smarter than most of us — and to the delight of a reader like myself who enjoys being challenged intellectually and emotionally, she isn’t afraid to show it.
She quotes Darwin and Protagoras.
She doesn’t give us easy answers or tidy resolutions. Although it takes place in modern times, through the chapters, we also learn about the Forge’s history as slaveowners and the tragic story of Allmon’s great-great-great-grandfather, an escaped slave.
And through all of this is a sense that the characters have fixed destinies — a fatalism from which they are each desperate to liberate themselves.
A few years go by, Henrietta and Allmon become lovers, but there’s little hope of a happy future for such damaged people.
Horse racing is about lineage, and so, too, is the story beneath the surface in “The Sport of Kings”. But people aren’t animals, and their lineage is more than just biology and genetics; it’s history and circumstance, both familial and sociological.
“The Sport of Kings” thrilled me and surprised me. It also reminded me why sometimes picking up a dense family saga can be such a wonderful reading experience.
You find characters you live and breathe with, and even the ones you love to hate.
