It was another long evening with a fire lit, and time on my hands. I couldn't face scrolling through endless trash on streaming websites and I wanted total immersion in another life. The Horseman on the Roof... yes, I like horses and Jean Giono is the writer of one of the most memorable (and prophetic) short stories I've ever read, The Man Who Planted Trees.
Giono's one of the writers who exists in the margin of my reading history, as a discovery I keep discovering. I read his work, I am hooked, and I put it back on the shelf. I often think of The Man Who Planted Trees and I'll recommend it, but he's rarely in the forefront of my mind. So I curled up in a blanket and began reading about the horseman. We were not yet in Tier 4 but it was being threatened. And I almost laugh out loud when I realise I'm reading about the cholera pandemic of the early 19th century in Provence.
The trouble is, the novel's absolutely compelling. To start with I'm hooked by descriptions of riding, of the empty countryside of Provence, and then by danger, human behaviour, the impact of a pandemic. It was the impact of cholera on people, Giono's insights into communities and how they respond to infections as well as power, quarantine and isolation, that kept me reading.
I have consciously avoided reading anything about pandemics. I re-read Camus' La Peste a long time back and that's stayed on the bookshelf. And in fact, I don't remember anything about the horseman so perhaps I bought it and never read it. When I finished the horseman, I started to read about Giono. He was born and died in Manosque in Provence, published the horseman in 1951 - it's one of Le Monde's books of the 20th century - and he was a pacifist. He made The Man who Planted Trees freely available, and his parents were a cobbler and a laundress. I like the sound of him because I'm mired at the moment in family history and those are two jobs that have marked my discoveries - I found my grandfather's birthplace in Dublin because his father was a bootmaker, and when I found my grandmother on a census in the New Forest, she was living with her aunt, a laundress.
And most importantly, it takes me back to the shepherd who restored a valley with trees, which itself reminds me of the Nobel prize-winning campaigner, Wangari Maathai, the woman who planted trees, and who would have been 80 in 2020.
Maathai began re-planting trees in Kenya in 1977, starting The Green Belt Movement across the African continent, focused on planting millions of trees. According to the Nobel Prize organisation, "she saw tree-planting in a broader perspective which included democracy, women's rights, and international solidarity..."
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