The Review of Contemporary Fiction
Hound Music by Rosalind BelbenElisabeth Sheffield
Rosalind Belben. Hound Music. Chatto & Windus, 2001. 306 pp. $27.50.
Set on an English country estate at the turn of the twentieth century, Hound Music centers on the Lupus family and the passion of its members (with the notable exception of Dorothy, mother of the Lupus children) for fox hunting. It would be a mistake, however, to reduce that passion to a lust for the pursuit and capture of poor Reynard. Rather, the hunt as Belben portrays it is a reveling in the lush and variegated experience of a particular time and place, a romp over a landscape “full of twists and turns and dips and terrible ruts and concealed tracks and traps and bogs and furze,” where George Lupus, Master of the Quarr Hounds, is as much a “great preserver” of the fox as he is a “great destroyer.” Belben renders this rich and paradoxical world with a curiously restless third-person point of view, which flits from image to image rather like stream-of-consciousness, only the flow of thought is confined to no individual mind. Instead, what we get is the effect of a collective mind occupied with itself, with its own desires and internal conflicts. Thus when Dorothy, “a poor horsewoman” possessed by “antipathy to you-know-what,” uses the death of George to banish all foxhounds from the estate, what we, as readers and privileged eavesdroppers, witness is the return of the repressed. With Hound Music Belben offers us, as George says of the spectacle of the hunt, “a treat.” It is not an easy treat, as the eccentric point of view and idiomatic diction don’t cut the reader much slack, but it is an authentic and worthwhile one. [Elisabeth Sheffield]