A Year of Reading: Airs Above The Ground by Mary Stewart - reviewed by Katherine Roberts

Yes, I know I promised to find my monthly reading in a real shop, but this one has been out of print for a while so I ordered it online from a secondhand bookseller that turned out to be a library, so it's possibly an ex-library copy and hopefully not cheating too much! 

Airs Above The Ground by Mary Stewart was first published in 1965. I was just three years old at the time and hadn't yet learnt to read, which might explain why it wasn't on my bookshelf back then.

I've come across Mary Stewart before. I can remember our school librarian putting the first book of her Arthurian trilogy, The Crystal Cave, into my hands and assuring me I would enjoy it. I was beginning to despair because most of the other books in our girls' grammar school library were fluffy teenage romances, which bored me at the time. The Crystal Cave and its sequels The Hollow Hills and The Last Enchantment were my first taste of fantasy fiction, which I absolutely loved. I never looked back, eventually writing an Arthurian series of my own: 'The Pendragon Legacy' about King Arthur's (fictional) daughter for Templar Books in 2012.

But Mary Stewart did not only write fantasy. Many of her books had contemporary or historical settings, like this one. Airs Above The Ground is set in Austria in what I imagine to be the early 1960s. The heroine Vanessa is a vet who has given up her career for marriage but lost touch with her husband. He is supposed to be working in Sweden, though she suspects after seeing a news reel about a fire at a circus that he is, in fact, in Austria with another woman. So off to Austria she goes, accompanied by her friend's teenage son Timothy, a horse enthusiast whose estranged father is now living in Vienna with a new fiancee.

With me so far? Murder and mystery carry the plot when two men are tragically burned to death in one of the circus caravans. But at the heart of the novel are the dancing white stallions of the Spanish Riding School in Vienna, the 'airs above the ground' of the title being the high school leaps performed by these world-famous Lipizzaners. When Vanessa treats a wound on an old circus horse's leg, she has little idea what adventures await her in the fairytale Austrian countryside.

I was actually hoping for a bit more focus on the horses, which do indeed take centre stage about halfway through the story before being confined to a stable for the action-filled second half. A missed opportunity maybe, but I suspect I'd enjoy Mary Stewart's fiction whatever she chooses to write about. I'm not really sure where you would classify this novel if it were published today - Romance? Mystery? Crime? Thriller? Adventure? Young Adult? - but those are often the best kind of books, a book true to its own story and not desperately trying to fit into a particular genre to make it easier to sell. Publishing in 1965 was a different game, yet Mary Stewart's writing feels timeless rather than dated, and her evocative prose makes this book a pleasure to read. The author has a long list of diverse titles to her name, so if you haven't come across her work before then there are plenty more to choose from. Enjoy!

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Katherine Roberts writes fantasy and historical fiction for young readers. She has so far published two full-length novels featuring famous horses from history (see below).

I am the Great Horse
The adventures of Alexander the Great straight from the horse's mouth

The Horse Who Would Be Emperor
 Caligula's favourite racehorse becomes heir to the throne in Ancient Rome.

Find out more at www.katherineroberts.co.uk