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Nicholas Evans, The Horse Whisperer, Bantam Press 1995
(annotation on the book sleeve)
In the still mountain of a snow-covered morning in upstate New York, a girl out riding her horse is hit by a 40-ton truck. Though horribly injured, both thirteen-year-old Grace and her horse Pilgrim survive. But the impact of their lives and the lives of those who love them is devastating.
Grace is the only child of a prominent New York magazine editor, Annie Graves, and her lawyer husband Robert. In a way which none of them at first understands, their destiny comes to depend upon Pilgrim's. So mutilated and traumatized is he that even the vet who saved his life now wishes he hadn't. Annie refuses to have him destroyed, sensing that if she does, something in Grace will die too.
She hears about a man in Monatana, a 'whisperer' who is said to have the gift of healing troubled horses. Abandoning her job, Annie sets across the continent like some latter-day pioneer, with Grace and Pilgrim, to find him. The man's name is Tom Booker and he lives in the Rocky Mountain Front, a place of daunting beauty, where the high plains run smack into a hundred-million-year-old wall of limestone. Here, under the massive Montana sky, all thair lives are changed forever.
At once an epic love story and a gripping adventure, The Horse Whisperer weaves an extraordinary tale of healing and redemption and marks the debut of a stunning new voice in contemporary fiction.
The book, the film and the song...
Unlike most of the book adaptation movies The Horse Whisperer (1998) perfectly fits the book and entirely represents its profoundity. Robert Redford directed and starred in this valuable adaptation. Although there are some slight plot changes, the book spirit is there, and the psychological curves are masterly rendered. This perfect correspondence between the book and the film is partly because of the director's skill, but partly because of the book's visual wideness. There are some drastic plot changes only at the end of the film.
Roger's lyrics are direct quotations from the book (part two, chapter six). Some of the words are present in the film as well, for example - 'for secrets uttered softly into pricked and troubled years, these men were known as Whisperers'. But other are directly taken from the book - like the stories of John Solomon Rarey and of Sullivan. That's why Roger credits Nicholas Evans as an author, although there are some obvious changes in the lyrics.
The chapter in question tells the story of the so-called whisperers, who had the gift to drive the devils out of the troubled horses' souls. The legends are actually read in the library by Annie, who is desperately seeking a way to cure Pilgrim.
One of the legends she reads about is of the Irishman Sullivan who lived two hundred years ago and who was famous for taming the most furious horses. No one knew how he did that, for he lead the horses into a darkened barn, but acording to Sullivan himself he whispered them the words of an Indian charm, 'bought for the price of the meal from a hungry traveler'.
Another story tells about John Solomon Rarey from Groveport, Ohio, who was so famous of his gift, that in 1858 he was summoned by Queen Victoria to Windsor Castle in England to calm a horse of hers. Before her very eyes 'Rarey put his hands on the animal and laid it down on the ground before him. Then he lay down beside it and rested his head on its hooves.' For that miracle Rarey was paid a hundred dollars. He soon became a legend and the press wanted more sensations. They found the most ferocious horse in all England - a stallion named Cruiser, who was a 'fiend incarnate' and had killed many stableboys despite of his eight-pound iron muzzle. For three hours alone with the stallion Rarey tamed him as well.
Tom Booker, the main character of the book, is a sort of successor of the whisperers, who has the natural gift to communicate with horses and take their fear away. That is the reason that makes Annie take her daughter and the wounded Pilgrim to Booker. But along with the horse's soul the power of this man and the power of love resurrects Annie's and Grace's souls as well.
Read more at the author's website. NICHOLAS
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