Maybe the Horse Will Talk
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4.0 • 57 Ratings
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- $12.99
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
‘I am absolutely terrified of losing a job I absolutely hate.’
Stephen Maserov has problems. A onetime teacher, married to fellow teacher Eleanor, he has retrained and is now a second-year lawyer working at mega-firm Freely Savage Carter Blanche. Despite toiling around the clock to make budget, he’s in imminent danger of being downsized. And to make things worse, Eleanor, sick of single-parenting their two young children thanks to Stephen’s relentless work schedule, has asked him to move out.
To keep the job he hates, pay the mortgage and salvage his marriage, he will have to do something strikingly daring, something he never thought himself capable of. But if he’s not careful, it might be the last job he ever has…
Warm, dramatic, and at times laugh-out-loud funny, with the narrative pull of a thriller, Maybe the Horse Will Talk is a love story, a reflection on contemporary marriage, and on friendship. It is also an unflinching examination of sexual harassment in the workplace and an exposé of corporate corruption that taps directly into the pulse of our times.
‘Australia’s outstanding social novelist’ (Times Literary Supplement), Elliot Perlman ‘...has many things working in his favor as a novelist: curiosity, erudition, daring and a gift for seducing readers into going along with him for the ride. He’ll get you where you want to go…’ (Washington Post)
Customer Reviews
Horsing around
3.5 stars
Author
Australian barrister (not barista) who has written three previous adult novels, a short story collection, and a book for kids. Lots of awards and award nominations. I’ve read the adult ones and liked them all, especially Seven Types of Ambiguity (2005) and The Street Sweeper (2011). Apparently, Mr P’s work "condemns the economic rationalism that destroys the humanity of ordinary people when they are confronted with unemployment and poverty". So there.
Plot
Stephen and Eleanor, both schoolteachers, get married, have a baby, and realise that raising a family in suburban Melbourne isn’t doable financially. He stops work and goes to law school; she supports him. He graduates and gets a job at a big commercial firm in Collins Street dominated by a partner with a psychopathic personality disorder (an Australian version of ‘Suits’, basically, sans princess). She has a second baby and chucks him out of the family home because he’s always at work, which is a bit unfair given that he comes over to bathe and read to the kiddiewinks each evening. Meanwhile, psychopartner is warming up for a cull of second year associates, and the firm’s biggest client is facing multiple sexual harassment cases. Our boy hates his job but can’t afford to lose it, so he plays the angles, with unlikely support from a disgruntled Rake-like ex-employee of his practice. The strategy seems to be working, but more and more angles keep turning up. Stuff happens. Baddies get their comeuppance, victimised chicks get compensated, and our boy is left on the horns of a dilemma.
Characters
Stephen is reasonably well developed, proving that pathetic people can make themselves useful sometimes. The rest of the cast could have been drawn by Bill Leak, were he still with us. The female characters are mostly damsel in distress stereotypes, which felt more than a tad sexist to at least one ageing white male with limited woke credentials.
Prose
Mr Perlman knows how to write. As distinct from his previous work, he tries to be funny here as well. Tries too hard IMHO, although there are some clever and amusing lines, especially from the guy who behaves like Rake.
Bottom line
The satire was heavy handed overall. And sexist. Did I mention that?
Uneven humour and weirdly off putting tone
I’ve made it about 180 pages into this book and won’t be finishing it. There are sections about crushing corporate culture, capitalist contradictions and the meaninglessness of work, which are very funny and well observed. But drawing on the me too movement for the purposes of humour needs to be carefully executed, and in my opinion, the author has not struck the right note here. The incidents of sexual harassment and assault that underpin the story are not funny, and making them fodder for a narrative about a boring man trying to save a number of beautiful women who are inexplicably attracted to him - the most conventional, male centric perspective imaginable - is funny only if viewed with an irony I don’t think the author intended. The book has thus far failed the Bechdel-Wallace test. It is a story about a man and work, with women and sexual harassment as exactly the kind of window-dressing one of the female characters at one point derides.