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Loading... Machine Without Horsesby Helen Humphreys
   None No current Talk conversations about this book.  alanteder | Jan 2, 2019 |  no reviews | add a review
"One of the best--and most wonderfully experimental--historical fiction titles of the year. . . . Truly spectacular." --Toronto Star What is an ordinary life worth? A seasoned writer stumbles across an obituary and imagination is sparked. The brief words of memoriam describe a woman who was both extraordinary--eccentric, revered in her field, a renowned expert--but also utterly ordinary. How does a writer, intrigued by all that isn't said, create a story, or capture an unknowable woman and all the secret passions, choices and compromises that make up a life? In Machine Without Horses, Helen Humphreys explores the real life and the imagined internal life of the famous and famously private salmon-fly dresser Megan Boyd, a craftswoman who worked for sixty years out of a bare-bones cottage in a small village in the north of Scotland. Humphreys, both present in the story and its architect, reveals with her inimitable style the complicated emotional landscape that can exist under even the most constant surface. No library descriptions found. |
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Wikipedia in English
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Review of the HarperCollins 2018 hardcover edition
This one was unorthodox in its title, its structure and its subject matter, and it appealed to me for all of those reasons. Humphreys divides the book in half. The first section is Humphreys' own non-fiction novel about the process of researching the life of real-life salmon fly tying expert Megan Boyd and about what decisions had to be made in the writing of her biographical fiction. The second half is the actual novella which was the result. The novella fictionalizes Megan into a new character named Ruth which was Humphreys' decision in order distance the fiction out of respect. I'm labelling the novel as 1/2 non-fiction novel and 1/2 novella as the relative lengths are pretty much an equal 144 pages in this 288 page book.
The title is its own puzzle, or at least it is for those most of us who don't know Scottish country dances. It isn't until pg. 121 that we discover (in the non-fiction section) that Machine Without Horses is "Megan's favourite dance ... and the one she is best at." That explanation still leaves its own mystery though. Why is the book titled after an event/incident that is only a tiny part of it? The reader can propose their own answers to that as no explanation is otherwise given. A simplistic one is that a salmon fly is a machine with which to catch fish. But perhaps a better one is that the human heart is a machine as well.
My thanks to Karan for the recommendation!
Trivia and Links
1. As mentioned in the Acknowledgements section, a recent biography is available called "Megan Boyd: The Story of a Salmon Flydresser" (2016) by Derek Mills and Jimmy Younger.
2. There is a recent documentary film Kiss the Water (2013) by director Eric Steel for which you can see the trailer on YouTube.
3. There are many examples of how to dance Machine Without Horses on YouTube. (