We witness the conflict in various stages, and throughout the war, Joey is ridden and owned by a number of different characters, from abusive soldiers to kind officers to a young girl. The narrator of War Horse, a shining steed named Joey, is able at times to move through the war almost unseen. If he wasn’t, Morpurgo was certainly going after the same effect as the Russian master. I wonder if Michael Morpurgo was thinking of Tolstoy’s story as he wrote War Horse. When Shklovsky labeled the idea of de-familiarization, one of the examples he used was from a story by Leo Tolstoy called “Kholstomer.” The narrator of Tolstoy’s story, as Shklovsky noted, “is a horse, and it is the horse’s point of view (rather than a person’s) that makes the content of the story seem unfamiliar.”

The term, which in Russian is ostranenie (?), was coined during World War I by the literary critic Victor Shklovsky, one of the leading figures in a major movement in literary criticism called Russian Formalism. The idea behind de-familarization is that writers will attempt to present something familiar to the reader in a new and strange way. When I was studying English at West Texas A&M University, we learned about a technique that novelists use called de-familiarization. And finally, we chose this book, War Horse, a children’s novel that shows the war from the point of view of one of the hundreds of thousands of horses who were a part of the war effort on both sides. We also selected A Son at the Front, Edith Wharton’s anti-war novel that contains no battle scenes, but instead focuses on the worried families left behind when their sons marched off to war. We selected Burning Beethoven, a nonfiction account of how the United States tried to eradicate German culture during the Great War. Instead, we attempted to view the conflict through different lenses as it were.

That’s mostly because anyone who’s interested in fictional recounting of the Great War has likely already read All Quiet on the Western Front and A Farewell to Arms. You won’t find Hemingway or Ford Madox Ford or Erich Maria Remarque on our reading list. This spring’s Book Club theme is World War 1, but we decided to forego the novels on the conflict that you might have expected us to select. I’m Jonathan Baker, a writer in Canyon, Texas, and I’ve been asked to talk a little about this month’s Radio Readers Book Club selection, War Horse by Michael Morpurgo.

War horse novel