14 OCTOBER 1995, Page 46

But yet the pity of it, Hank

Tom Hiney

THE HORSE WHISPERER by Nicholas Evans Bantam, £14.99, pp. 348 Rich woman falls in love with cowboy, has sex with him, but cowboy dies in tragic accident . . .

As it turns out, The Horse Whisperer is such a laborious book that one can't help but enjoy its brutal ending. Montana scenery apart (and there isn't a chocolate box big enough to do it justice), there is nothing to suggest why Hollywood has paid so much money for it other than its clearly intended subtitle, Bridges of Madison Coun- ty II. The 'we-met-too-late' romantic for- mula has been stretched much too far here. The characters are just too unlikely. For the rugged photographer of Madison County read cartoon horseman Tom Book- er, and for an Iowan mother of two read glamorous Manhattan media dominatrix Annie Graves. Fate and a sick horse brought them together and fate (not a moment too soon) tears them apart.

This book manages to be neither erotic, sad, funny nor warming, quite an achieve- ment for a story featuring sex under the stars, a crippled child and, of course, beau- tiful (and beautifully metaphorical) horses. All the weepy components are here except the imagination that can turn genre fiction into something memorable. There is noth- ing that lingers. One can't help feeling that in his effort to deliver what the reader wants Nicholas Evans has stopped trying to entertain himself. And when that happens, a book dies on its feet.

Consider the eventual sex scene, which Evans leaves right till the end. We know it's coming and he knows we know it's com- ing. That has always been the challenge of good romantic fiction: to exploit the shared anticipation between writer and reader so that both are dying for the moment when it arrives. But by the time this one arrives on page 301 it jars. It doesn't even sound fun. It just sounds like someone writing a sex scene:

And he felt no shame nor saw any in her, for why should they feel shame at what was not of their own making but of some deeper force that stirred not just their bodies but their souls and knew naught of shame nor of any construct.

It's very easy to laugh at fictional sex scenes, but this one seems particularly bad and particularly representative of the whole book. It is like a collage of previously writ- ten sex scenes rather than one specific to this particular coupling. Evans seems to be giving us what he thinks we want, ad nause- am. The result is frozen slush of the worst D. H. Lawrence-by-numbers variety.

Near the beginning of The Horse Whis- perer, the cowboy turns on a television set in time to hear a breakfast news items:

A guy from Oakland had parked in the middle of the Golden Gate Bridge, shot his wife and two kids and then jumped off. Traffic both ways was at a standstill.

The news, and story, moves on, but this is in some ways the most thought- provoking moment in the novel. What on earth can have been going on in that car before the man stopped? What new heights of whining did his wife and children man- age to reach in order to produce such a reaction? Did he plan it or did they just happen to touch a soft spot while on the bridge? Where were they supposed to be driving to? Did Evans make this up or was it really on the news once? And if he made it up, then which is the more interest- ing urban male fantasy — shooting your family or having sex under the stars on a ranch?