FICTION: EILEEN BATTERSBYreviews TaurusBy Joseph Smith Cape, 217pp, £12
A BULL battles against the relentless heat of a sun so vicious it drains all life and energy. He watches the changing sky and notices the parched earth, "a lifeless thing on which cling blunted stems of green". The bull is at the mercy of his physical bulk, his power; the dangerous strength that surges through a body that although it is his own he has come to regard as a strange, terrifying entity. Curiosity has become his medium. Taurusis a stark, dramatic exploration written in a formal prose of stately beauty, the elemental rhythms of which draw on the music of myth and the earliest literary tradition. The bull reacts, albeit responding to his world at a distance.
The exciting English original, Joseph Smith, already attempted the near impossible with his first novel, The Wolf(2008), a work of such haunting, dignified beauty that it left the reader both elated and diminished. It tells the story of a lone wolf caught in a bleak unforgiving winter and desperate for food. "I am the wolf, the taker of life; the predator. I attack with my eyes open and see death bright and fierce leap in the glance of my prey." But this time, it is different. His efforts leave him wounded, desperate and increasingly vulnerable.
Rejecting sentimentality and pathos, The Wolfreads as an Anglo-Saxon epic. There is an eerie grandeur to it that is lyrical and epic, and ultimately triumphant. The wolf is a tragic hero, his quest doomed but no less majestic for that. In Taurus, Smith again selects an animal narrator, this time a bull. It is daring to adopt such a technique once; even more risky to repeat it.
Yet Smith does and again triumphs in a work that it is more complex because of the ambivalent nature of the bull; half-victim, half-villain; alert to all sensation, yet always remote.
This time, the animal narrator is not only affected by the world of men; he lives within it. He patrols his paddock by day and by night inhabits the barn he shares with a rival of sorts, the Grey, a crazed horse that spends many hours imprisoned in a stall. No, the animals are not pals; Smith is closer to Milton than Disney. His apocalyptic novels are strange and passionate; cruel and executed with a bleak, balletic allure. The grace of the horse, its effortless movement, contrasts with the heaving mass that is the bull.
Admittedly anyone who has read The Wolfwill be somewhat prepared for the experience that is Taurus; even so, this story will unsettle. For readers who are coming to Smith for the first time, the narrative is like nothing you have ever read, except perhaps William Blake's daunting vision as articulated in The Tyger(1794).
Taurus pushes the dramatic intensity and bold physicality of The Wolfa stage further. In The Wolf, the narrator responds to the situation in which he finds himself, a world suspended by winter; the narrator of Taurus, although he views the humans that tend him as his captors, is primarily at war with his massive self.
He explores the surging strength, the heaving immensity he has amassed; it determines his movements, it both thrills him and oppresses him: “I can see myself – I can see the large black shape planted on short legs, the thick shoulders and neck and the huge broad head with horns pointing skyward. I swish my tail and snort and stamp and I can see a bull, doing these things.” He feels blessed and cursed; a god, a prisoner.
His days pass waiting for the feeding that heralds the coming of night with its soothing darkness.
As he patrols his paddock, the bull is preoccupied by balancing his present state with memories of his younger self. Then, he was petted, nurtured. There was comfort. Now he is feared, goaded into ever increasing madness.
His destiny is apparent; a barbaric sport and a sacrificial death. The humans he knows, particularly the boy, have become tormentors. There are other enemies, the two farm dogs that bait him, enraging him in a way that even the humans can’t.
The attack when it finally happens is a battle to the death; the fury is choreographed in prose that shimmers and conveys a deranged urgency. Smith evokes frenzied movement, the sheer hatred of the enemies, the bull and the dogs, the “storm of ferocity”.
Initially, the bull is more observer than participant: “I watch blankly as the dog finishes closing the space between us, a trace of its scent reaching me along with the sound of its panting. Then suddenly, it has struck at my side and I feel its weight judder through me, a shocking novelty of impact, a violence similar to the boy’s thumping fist that occasionally flashes at me as I make my way through the channel of wood, but much greater in force and the disbelief it causes: a mixture of emptiness that a growing confusion tries to fill, and pain beginning at my side where the dog has my flesh in its jaws and tugs and tries to twist its wide head, its heavy efforts pulling at me to shake my own . . . I can only watch, neck curved, as this wildness seems to suckle from me and tries to tear me apart.”
THE BULL EXPERIENCES pain but far more important is the excitement, the “terrible thrill” of the fight. “I can feel the blood in me as if there were another thing like eyes or ears devoted to it . . . I think that any creature or wall placed in front of me I could destroy.” He kills both of the dogs, regretting only that his foe can feel no more pain. He goes on to even more serious acts.
Smith has created a consciousness that reacts but does not analyse. The narrative races along sustained by the bull’s intensified responses to the thrill of destruction, smashing his various compounds. He glories in havoc; all the while he remains torn between his present state and his awareness of his former self. He laments his youth but also despises it.
There is a wonderful, soaring artistry at work. Smith looks to the medieval and also to the moment. Taurusis magnificent in its menace. It is a worthy successor to The Wolf.
Smith the storyteller is concerned with truth and the realism that the evil men do resonates in nature and beyond. Man's cruelty had a walk-on part in The Wolf. This time it dominates a tale that is both mysterious and polemical. Taurusis a subtle morality play; beautiful, relentless and unforgettable.
Eileen Battersby is Literary Correspondent of The Irish Times
