8 SEPTEMBER 2001, Page 39

From a view to

a death

Jane Ridley

HOUND MUSIC by Rosalind Belben Chatto & Hindus, £15.99, pp. 306 ISBN 0701172770 This is a subtle, brilliant and paradoxical novel. Rosalind Belben writes prose like Virginia Woolf, but she has chosen a subject that could hardly be more distasteful to urban, right-thinking Bloomsbury — the fox-hunting English upper class.

The year is 1900-1, and George Lupus is Master of the Quarr Fox Hounds. He lives in the big house at Quarr with his wife and four children, 30-odd horses and 118 foxhounds. In the list of characters the 21st century loves to hate, the fox-hunting squire runs Margaret Thatcher a close second, but George is no beefy, barking, flatulent stereotype. He is a mystic and dreamer who sees ghosts, and has a strange and magical 'gift' for hunting hounds. Only hunting absorbs George entirely. Out hunting he is god, adored and worshipped by his followers who burn just to be close to him. For George cruelty is not an issue. Like him, the fox is a gentleman.

Then George has an unexpected heart attack out hunting and is brought home to die. The wandering thoughts of the dying huntsman are brilliantly imagined. People try desperately to connect with him, but George, whose family motto is Touch me not, can only really communicate with his dogs. He summons the fox-hounds to his deathbed.

After George's death his widow Dorothy can no longer bear the hounds. The noise they make reminds her of their strange, unearthly howling on the night that George died. The hounds are dispersed, and the hunt horses are auctioned. Rigid with anger and numbed by grief, Dorothy is hateful to her children and poisonous to her servants. She travels to North Africa to recuperate, and stays with a couple who try to assault her, or so she thinks. Fleeing from them she gets lost in the prairie, and is rescued by a 15-year-old African boy named Daoud. Through her strange nearsexual encounter with him (shades of A Passage to India), she discovers a buried part of herself.

George had laid down that the children must see death, but what he had not armed them for was desolation and misery. Alone at Quarr, the children take control of their own world. Collecting together a motley pack of terriers, pet dogs and the odd stray fox-hound, they revive the Quarr hounds. Eight-year-old Bevis discovers that he has `the gift' for hunting hounds, with his sister Ida acting as Master. When Dorothy returns she attempts in a stupid grown-up sort of way to control their hunt, appoint a huntsman and dress them in canarycoloured coats. The children rebel, They will only hunt on their own terms and Dorothy is at last persuaded to abandon her efforts to control them. In this novel true wisdom belongs to the innocent, to the children at Quarr, to the African boy Daoud, and most of all to the godlike George.

Rosalind Belben writes beautifully about nature, and she is able to characterise animals without sentimentalising them. Her car for speech is astonishing – too perfect perhaps, because at times she uses language which must be impenetrable to anyone outside today's embattled world of fox-hunting. She is taking risks by assuming that her readers will know what is meant by 'lifting hounds too quickly' or `feathering a line', or that they will be up to speed on the Edwardian debate about breeding hounds with the Belvoir blood.

Fox-hunting is a subject oddly attractive to women writers. M. J. Farrell (alias Molly Keane) immortalised Anglo-Irish fox-hunting and now Rosalind Belben has done the same for the Edwardians. No one has ever written better than she does here about the English upper-class cult of fox-hunting pre1914 — that forgotten era of side saddles and double bridles, of quasi-religious rituals like `blooding' children or Sunday morning stables inspection, of gentle, inarticulate hunting men who connect better with their dogs than they do with their wives. Hound Music is a minor classic, perhaps a major one an enthralling and non-judgmental evocation of a vanished world.