An Equestrian Reads Dick Francis: Essay by Su Zi

An Equestrian Reads Dick Francis

 Insofar as genre writers might have some renown, Dick Francis has been a fairly ubiquitous name as an author. The roving reader might happenstance a copy, and the title which somehow found its way was Whip Hand in a rather nice, 1979 hardbound, first edition. Of course, the title is of significance to every equestrian, as there are rules about the holding of whips; traditionally held in the left hand, a skilled reinsman must switch hands with the whip quickly and fluidly.

The work in one in a series, with established characters, however, the protagonist wears a prosthetic hand. A casual poke into the offerings of the AI reveals that the disability of the character is well-reviewed and cites a sector. com article that, in part, says that “readers with disabilities generally respond positively [...] for providing some of the most nuanced, respectful and realistic disability representation in 20^th-century popular fiction” Francis doesn’t muck about with being coy about the disability, as the first sentence of chapter one says 

“I took the battery out of my arm and fed it into the recharger, and only realized I’d done it when ten seconds later the fingers wouldn’t work” (3).

And whilst many disabilities do not involve prosthetics, being introduced to a character with a disability at the starting bell is rare even in writing that is specifically about disability.

But the topic is horses, or rather a story involving horses, and equestrians might sometimes also be sensitive as to the accuracy of representation. Francis indirectly gives us a description of horse trainers— a crucial person in the life of an equestrian, but not a particularly well-known character type, generally. “Some of the cream of the world’s bloodstock floated year by year to his stable, and even having a horse in his yard gave the owner a certain standing” (7). While it might be as true a description of any well-renowned management team for any athlete or performer, the reader ought to consider the triplicate nature of what Francis undertakes in his writing: to have his characters in a series show consistency in behaviors, to have his first time readers understand the series well enough to sit down for the whole read, and to not get the equestrian details wrong.

These are racehorses, and often enough, our protagonist takes us to the track—not the visitor side, but the working one.

“Outside the weighing room there was the same old bunch of familiar faces carrying on chats that have been basically unchanged for centuries: who was going to ride what, and who was going to win, and there should be a change in the rules, and what so-and-so had said about his horse losing [...] the same mingling of honor and corruption” (17)”.

And while this view might be close to form for those who have been to the back side of a racetrack, for those who have not, Francis makes this acerbic observation:

“City dwellers might be addicted to gambling, but not to fresh air and horses. Birmingham and Manchester, in days gone by, had lost their racecourses to indifference” (17)

And while the book’s copyright is now near a half century ago, those who had a fondness for racing do have the demolition of the great American racecourse Arlington Park to mourn in recent memory, and to emphasize this author’s point.

Horse savvy readers might be more savoring of Francis’ doings among horse people, and certainly there’s enough sub plot to entertain even the young and restless reader, but what of the horses themselves? It is about the horses themselves that dick Francis begins to surge out of the pack of horsie-set storytelling:

I had enjoyed it well enough when i was sixteen, on account of the horses. Beautiful, marvelous creatures whose responses and instincts worked on a plane as different from humans as water and oil, not mingling even where they touched. Insight into their senses and consciousness has been like an opening door, a foreign language glimpsed and half-learned, full comprehension maddeningly balked by not having the right sort of hearing or sense of smell, nor sufficient skill in telepathy” (69).

Francis gives further insight in the following sentence, “The feeling of oneness with horses I’d sometimes had in the heat of a race had been their gift to an inferior being” (17). And while not every equestrian has experienced both Francis’ insight and experience, the tradition of equestrianism has that perception as a pinnacle of achievement.

For readers who might be more of what Francis called a “city-dweller”, the experienced components of the genre are well-represented in this detective story. For those with no taste for splatttergore, Francis has a certain remove from his protagonist that makes even the grueling-but-expected scenes of violence to be more psychological terror than the slow motion explosion that can be too distressing for a casual reader. In all, Francis provides a pleasurable trail-ride of a read for someone who might know how to hold a rope, and is apparently popular enough with those who don’t; nonetheless, a solid ride for all levels of experience.

Su Zi is a writer, poet and essayist who produces a handmade chapbook series called Red Mare. She has been a contributor to GAS from back when it was called Gypsy Art Show, more than a decade ago. Check out her author page on Amazon.

GAS Featured Poet: Ma Yongbo

Ma Yongbo was born in 1964, Ph.D, representative of Chinese avant-garde poetry, and a leading scholar in Anglo-American poetry. He is the founder of polyphonic writing and objectified poetics. He has published over eighty original works and translations since 1986 included 9 poetry collections. He focused on translating and teaching Anglo-American poetry and prose including the work of Dickinson, Whitman, Stevens, Pound, Amy Low.

Local Reality: Necessary Fiction

 

The flame extinguished, it's time to clear the ashes,

chaos, seen from a broader perspective,

yields order. Dunes unite with the beach,

the wind's direction and the ocean is also dunes of liquid,

temporal. Swallows fly densely, then scatter,

riding air currents, spiralling, ascending, suddenly entering

strong winds from the sea, like raindrops tinged with rust,

unfolding tilted fans. Those lines, upright thin lines,

slanted, curved thick lines, with sharpness,

assimilated by promenading colour blocks into a vibrant harmony.

 

Suddenly arriving novelties, in later hours,

meet misfortune, but see from the future's direction,

humbly shrink into a dot, dismissible by architects,

while architecture becomes the fiction of sand and bricks,

viewed abstractly as the provincial government hovering above the city

by designers with inverted telescopes. Magazines advance seasons,

including festivals, weather, sweat. Morning's forecasted drizzle

delays its arrival, postponing the evening's advent altogether.

Who postpones his own life? Shaking off flames from shoulders,

attaining bone-chilling cold from ashes.

 

Burning is extinguishing. What extinguishes here burns elsewhere,

Revealing influence in the future, but not beyond

the horizon and a gradually narrowing window: a series of nested windows

pushing to the corner of a computer screen,

easily magnify one window, dragging it around aimlessly

until the inertia of reality reaches zero. Like a mouse

clasping onto a clip on its tail. But there are no slogans on the streets,

no red armbands. Only Microsoft's colossal advertisements

continuously zoom in and out of the sky. Like a square basketball hoop

catching the Earth. Deep things manifest on the flat plane.

 

Things yet to exist govern you, demanding you possess

traits of the worldly. A child aims at you from afar,

a cardboard target collapsing under the pressure of a water column,

slow-motion falling waist-down. Dampness connects grasslands and forests

and farther highways, silence and a family's childhood:

A poem yet to take shape alters your physiological responses.

Who exactly dominates whom? Its future

is your identity. You will never have an identity,

never gather images of yourself scattered in crowds,

a series of nested offices diminishing you to nil.

 

Some things, in life as in poetry,

will never continue. Continues the weather

and the prelude to weather, the workshops stay idle,

the commuter bus remains punctual. Perfect days continue starting like this:

"It's really cold out." "Yeah, freezing."

"That rain last night, it was pouring."

"Oh, I must've been asleep, didn't hear."

"Raindrops were huge like this."

Another interjects, "More rain tonight."

"What about daytime?" "Same, light to moderate."

Then gazing out the window, repeating landscapes, or catnapping.

 

In the evenings they discuss stocks, river swelling, the sinking of something，

and the floating of others. Topics from the previous day

don’t continue, but they start anew:

"Bought 'Life'?" They exchange morning papers,

and in the finance section are the changes they care about.

I take it literally, "Life, is it for sale?"

As morning papers, evening papers, weeklies, and dailies, all slap

my forehead, chasing away lingering dreams, I know the numbers

unified content with form has covered our consciousness.

Things along the way, snowballing, enveloping the expanding brain like a runaway.

 

Local news, the announcer broadcasts in standard Mandarin,

those who missed it read newspapers, without newspapers

listen to recaps, more concise and condensed instead.

A corpse circulates among munching mouths, its odour

permeates every province of the body. A reader reaches climax,

removes his glasses, and raises his voice. They marvel at the cunning of a criminal,

calculating how many Benzes or Crowns he can buy with embezzled funds,

pondering the "additional" income of a factory director for a year,

they instantly became sons of bitches. The universality of fact comes from

standard Mandarin. A culprit steals tyres from a car accident.

 

People all stand up in public buses, make a saluting glance,

those on the road resemble a black wreath draped over wreckage,

holding an early funeral. Direction and distance become immediate issues.

I sit among the heels of people's shoes, contemplating

how to describe a car accident and how to make the brief things

enter eternity. In it, control death's acceleration

with intonation, line breaks, and punctuation. How to make the absent

present, rewind time. But clearly, there's no place inside

for a soul. For it's inconceivable to imagine a soul

in violent agitation, following the forward inertia of matter

 

or following God's gravity upward, like a diver with hands raised high

floating towards the surface of the atmosphere. What is a soul?

What's the ratio between soul and body weight? If one

finds oneself floundering amid material surroundings, and appreciates

this floundering, is it the soul at play?

Is it the soul that makes dough ferment and rise?

Local news, radio waves shuttle through the air, saliva and lead type,

coarse fingers stained black, jammed into ear canals, excavating.

The Atlantic swirls like half a newspaper, sucks into a flushing toilet.

Readers of the day-after newspaper feel their appearance is antiquated.

 

God sits at the computer, rotating, adeptly transforming things

into symbols. Each entity is projected into another space

by corresponding laws. Inside the dark machine,

a tired screw loosens, and a grain of sand trembles

wearing out the heart. What life disallows

finds fulfilment in electronic games, In this regard

computers are as useful as poetry. I love this occupation

this age didn't prepare us for a Troy,

but gave us something better: Pentium, Intel.

is it an abbreviation for "International"?

 

The Internet spreads the passion of revolutionising viruses

at light speed. Clouds obstruct every harbour,

in science lie factors humans can't predict and grasp,

eventually, human beings will be governed by their creations.

"Seems you’re not doing well in your occupation." In art,

necessary ambiguity yields unexpected meanings,

unlike in science. "I know, I analyse reports, charts,

Yunnan's earthquake and leader's demise, stocks require rationality,

unlike art." Knowledge doesn't bring happiness,

the stock exchange hall turns rational people into intuitive ones.

 

"This is too negative. Your talent should bring something,

is the remuneration high? Do you want to earn all your money at once

or slowly? Hang out with them! Find a way in." Hang out with whom?

Apart from money, people have no common ground and topic,

listeners' shrewd eyes look like fishes about to slip away,

objects on two planes cause friction, on one plane

lead to a collision. Like two people in love, first collide in thoughts,

then in bodies. Ice rubs leaving behind melting conversation,

a boring conversation exposes the folly of both sides,

turning an abstract person back into a concrete one.

 

The grand fictional principle governs everything. Most times,

you don't feel reality, only at certain moments does it reveal itself,

stubborn like a rusty nail poking out of a wooden plank, for example

allotting houses, raising wages, assessing professional titles, son’s school enrolment,

money and power fictionalise reality, so you resort to fictionalising poetry,

you can continue like this, at least end up sacrificing for art,

but your son is innocent. Between personal freedom and responsibility,

a deflated ball is kicked back and forth, getting flatter and flatter,

putting everything into poetry is still a paper tiger,

unable to withstand wind and rain, let alone fire burning.

 

Money, money, money! Money increases in price every day,

a poem used to sell for twenty yuan, now it is only ten.

Elizabeth Bishop said poetry is a sketch of an old Canadian dollar,

white, grey-green, or iron-grey. I think it's more like a cartoon:

metaphors and symbols amend colloquialisms, abstracts distort concretes,

cabbage and tomato prices change daily, like weather,

pedlars and customers tug of war over every inch of land,

one weakens, the other strengthens. But the strongest

is still the dollar. Overlapped elderly faces are repeatedly posted.

The faces of students doing application questions in the market are blurred.

 

Reality is astronomical figures, you are a decimal point.

how to combat it? You can't even find its nest,

a part of reality can crush you, more terrifying than a woman's parts.

The realism of holding a magnifying glass reflects parts as wholes,

while the romanticism of holding a telescope scorns reality.

How can an observer see clearly what surrounds him?

Attitude towards reality separates crowds in the square,

flower corpses wrapped in plastic bags fly into the clouds,

The face of an island nation living on guano export spreads overhead,

Those who advocate of fiction themselves are phantoms, just pretending to be unaware.

 

So allow me to fictionalise a true story,

I place it in a loss-making factory in the twentieth century,

on the thirteenth floor, an office overlooking the river, a middle-aged man,

a melancholic love affair. Not in a park, not on

the dance floor of desire spinning, farting, trampling the sea

on the backs of codfish, or the heaven ascending higher and higher in a word,

this took half an hour of collective time and personal passion from him,

including pauses for water and restroom breaks,

he seemingly accidentally brushes her hand on the hesitant chess move,

the coldness inside his body prompts him to grasp it, "Are you cold?"

 

Her hand coils around his like a warm little snake

(She sat behind him when she was first assigned,

pitied him and his untimely poems incessantly)

her narrow hips make him feel the stinginess of fate,

he starts to elevate, seeking excuses for his timidity,

"Don't think life can be entered endlessly,

only at my age, one can understand love isn't a game,

but a measure of humanity." He quotes others sentences,

playing with childish feelings, "We shouldn't be like this."

Her fluctuating chemical face slaps his moral sense.

 

"Let's write letters, it's the only thing worth treasuring."

Two years later she's still so thin, except for some parts getting thicker.

He loves her more, and sees it as the end of youth

rather than an episode, nurturing an inevitable old age

with the body. They didn't say goodbye, nor write letters,

he was more like a mentor, accompanying her through the purgatory of youth,

returning her to a happy marriage. The world took away

his last straw, leaving only boring memories and

the agony of visceral shapes. Now he writes these down

as if writing someone else's story, as if he doesn't exist.

 

15 May 1997-3 December 1997

GAS Featured Poet: John Martino

John Martino is a writer, photographer, and educator currently residing in Hong Kong with his life-partner, Xiuli. His debut book of poetry, American Sonnet, a suite of 51 "little songs," was published by Half Inch Press in September 2025. Additional poems can be found at North Dakota Quarterly, Another Chicago Magazine, Packingtown Review, The Southern Quill, The Bitchin' Kitsch, and J Journal, among others. He is the Executive Editor at Home Planet News (homeplanetnews.com).

Little Pig, Little Pig

Don't mistake the words on the page

for the poem itself. Don't mistake

rage for direct and clear-minded

intent. Whether gunshot or engine

backfire, the letters jump and scatter,

take flight like a murder of crows,

realign as musical notes on an overhead

wire. The page in your hand is blank,

but the poem remains. Try to blow

it down and, like a house built of solid

air, it absorbs and integrates, grows

stronger. Most nights, I'm behind that

house, aiming arrows at the darkness,

guided only by a howling moon. Don't

mistake this for misdirection. In the sure

light of morning, walking and observing,

look at the many new targets heretofore

unknown: brick heart, human wall,

garden vault, bank gnome. You think

you know, but you don't. The biggest,

baddest toe of them all. A lifetime spent

misreading the signs, no matter how far

you roam. Remember: This little piggy went

to market doesn't mean it comes home.

Whitman Sampler

I celebrate my selfie! And play

with it, too. And what I exhume,

you shall exhume. For every atom

bomb belonging to me

as good belongs to you.

Tabulation of all our days

down to a spear of summer grass.

I grow lean and loath under

camera eyes. Watch me scratch

my patched mass.

I sing the body electrified,

hooded, buggered with a broomstick,

tortured by water, the flick

of a Bic. I sing of truth

extracted with a tooth.

I sing of twisted truths buffed to perfection.

I sing "America the Beautiful

Idea / Someday we'll live inside

the IKEA" and point the way

with invisible hands. The heat

sputters and cracks like Pop Rocks.

I leave teeth marks in every sugar-coated

confession, put all the half-eaten

pieces, each wounded dead,

back into the box.