The Horse by Willy Vlautin: tuned to the broken-down key of life

The Horse is Willy Vlautin’s most satisfying book to date, with its central music narrative adorned with vivid vignettes of his usual offbeat, misfit characters tuned to the broken-down key of life in twilight towns filled with temptation and trouble.

Vlautin is one of the finest singer-songwriters around, in bands Richmond Fontaine and The Delines, and The Horse is the first time he has written about music. His music and novels are close cousins, registering life’s everyday struggles, of “hard times testing the easy”.

Al Ward is at the heart of hard times in The Horse. A washed-up sixtysomething musician living near a deserted mine, carless and 30 miles from a town and 6,000ft up, Al has a strong supply of pre-crushed kismet and is struggling with anxiety (“As though someone was trying to push him out of an aeroplane from thirty thousand feet”) and alcoholism (“He destroyed his life in hopes of saving it”).

He awakens one morning to find a mistreated stray horse outside his shack. The horse forces Al to make a move, allowing Vlautin to construct a clever series of musical flashbacks alongside a seemingly quixotic rolling equine-rescue mission.

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It all works superbly as Vlautin intersects tender, torn and frayed episodes of wrecks, drugs and rock’n’roll into Al’s redemptive quest. The writing on music is superb; the underbelly of the working-band life, of the wannabes and never-gonna-bes rings so true here, you know Vlautin has lived part of it, seen a lot of it. “From bad nerves to no nerves in one drink”, he writes of life-on-the-road adrenaline, bringing a salty reality to the music fan’s Tequila fantasy.

[ Willy Vlautin: ‘You try to make something that is a story, and is about life, but also says something that matters’ ]

The songs and lyrics that Al has written through the years – My World Died in a Las Vegas Suite, I Reached for the Top Shelf and Ended Up in the Well, Long Hauling, Long Hurting, Long Overdue – bring some light relief to the many shades of sadness in The Horse. He also recalls a time working with colourful characters such as Mona Maverick (she “walked into the room smelling of perfume, whiskey and bacon”).

Despite all the trials and tribulations of Al’s previous life on the road, it is the music that provides sanctuary from his soul-crushing feelings of having no spiritual direction home. “When you write a good tune, it’s like holding hope in your pocket”, the usually reticent protagonist reminds himself.

The horse, meanwhile, near-blind, needing help and motionless, leads Al to a place that restores his sense of humanity (that beat-up old horse is hanging on for something) and by the novel’s conclusion proves that nothing or no one is beyond rescuing.