R.A. MacAvoy, whose debut novel was "Tea with a Black Dragon," has written another charming, but lesser known fantasy called "The Grey Horse." Its story takes place in 1881, in County Connemara, Ireland, during the time when the Irish National Land League was trying to oust foreign (English) landlords and teach the local farmers to stand up for their rights to fair rents and fixed tenure on the land. Irish revolutionaries are an integral part of MacAvoy's landscape, but they enhance the fantasy rather than intrude upon it.As the novel begins, the old horse trainer, Anrai Õ Reachtaire discovers a púca (fairy horse) on his way to the village of Carraroe. He mistakes it for a strayed Connemara pony stallion, standing alone on a hill, without hobble or halter. The púca kneels, inciting Anrai to mount (what horseman could resist such a fair invitation?), and off they gallop on one of Fantasy's best and funniest wild rides.
Anrai finally manages to throw a rope halter over the pony's head:
"Anrai felt a jolt as through the horse had shied in place. Its sides went as stiff as wood. It hopped and trembled and before Anrai's eyes began to steam. Startled himself by this reaction, Anrai very warily tied the lead rope to both sides of the mouthpiece, making a sort of bridle out of the halter. 'Don't tell me you're a stranger to the old rope halter, my lad,' he whispered gently, close to the horse's ear. He saw a round eye ringed with white, and the long, unkempt yellow tail switched left to right. Anrai had a sinking feeling there would be a fight between himself and this horse on the stones of Knockduff Peak.
"But he had to go home. At this season, there were no more than two more hours of light and likely no visible moon after that. He gave the horse an experimental squeeze of the legs. In perfect obedience it moved down the mountainside."
Once haltered, the púca has to obey Anrai. They canter home, and the old man spends several weeks trying to find the pony's unknown owner. Meanwhile, although he grows fond of the grey, he obeys a hunch to leave its halter on. It isn't until Anrai decides the stallion is really his to keep that he attempts to perform a minor operation on him---he already has two stud horses in his barn and doesn't need a third. He and his stablehand strap the grey into a chute, and Anrai asks for his knife:
"The grey horse gave a convulsion that shook the oak posts, so deeply sunk into stone. The front straps broke, and it rose up screaming, not as the furious chestnut had screamed, but very like a man.
"It stood, and seemed to dwindle, and then toppled over in confusion. It shouted, 'By heaven, man! Look what you are about!' And then there was no horse."
Anrai, in the sudden throes of heart failure, manages to remove his halter from the púca, and the horse-turned-man promptly saves his life.
We learn why the púca, whose name is Ruairi MacEibhir has decided, after many centuries, to return to the haunts of man. He has fallen in love with one of the village women and wants to court her in the guise of Anrai's stablehand.
The courting of Máire NiStandún takes the rest of the book, as she is not sure she wants to marry a sometime-man sometime-horse. The land revolt swirls on around the quarreling couple. Old Anrai challenges a half-English landowner to a match race: the landlord's chestnut Thoroughbred against his grey Connemara stallion. Anrai's no-good son deserts from the British army and slinks home to cause all sorts of trouble. The local priest attempts to baptize Anrai's new stablehand---the púca survives his baptism, although the priest almost doesn't.
Basically, MacAvoy has written a story of life in a small, nineteenth-century Connemara village, with a horse-fairy thrown in to really get the Irish up. Even if you've read every other Celtic fantasy to hit the shelves (there seem to be a million of them), you'll not have found one as entrancing, or as madly Gaelic as "The Grey Horse."
