Gonzalo Giner (Madrid, 1962) takes the step and crosses the fence that separates him from a stud farm. The animals look at him, waiting to see if he brings food or if he is just coming to be photographed, like so many others. They end up sensing his good intentions and advance towards him, cautiously, until they stop at a piece of land where a placenta lies. The night before, a foal was born and it is not difficult to guess who the mother is, from its bloody hind legs. The writer appreciates the gesture and reciprocates with caresses. He doesn’t want to scare them, his respect is maximum. For this reason, he became a veterinarian rather than a writer.
“I couldn’t leave aside either of the two facets but, if I had to choose, I would choose being close to the animals. “My connection with them is stronger than with the lyrics, which is saying something,” he acknowledges to La Vanguardia from the La Cartuja stud farm, in Jerez de la Frontera, where he has traveled to present his latest book, The Shadow of Dreams (The Shadow of Dreams). Planeta), the first after winning the Fernando Lara award with La bruma verde (2020).
It is no coincidence that I chose this place. In its pages, as in previous novels such as The Horse Healer (2008) or The Rider of Silence (2011), the steeds are very present. Marengo, Incitatus, Bucephalus, Palomo… All of them are horses that at some point in history came to share fame with the leaders of their time: Napoleon, Caligula, Alexander the Great and Simón Bolívar, respectively. The Madrid author rescues them in his plot along with a historical figure who, he acknowledges, “has always caught my attention”: Saladin, great sultan of Egypt and conqueror of cities like Cairo and Damascus.
“We have always been told that he was the bad guy in the story. After all, we lived in a Western civilization and we sent our men to fight against his army. This time I wanted to put myself on the other side and I discovered what a great leader he was. He achieved for the first time the unification of Islam in what would be called the Holy War against the Christians. And he was respected by both his people and his enemies, because he was an example of chivalry. He even sent doctors to Richard the Lionheart, one of his rivals, when he found out that he had been wounded, and he also gave him a horse when he learned that he had lost his in battle.
In its pages, Giner does not travel alone to the time of Saladin. He jumps to World War II and later years, as well as contemporary times. A combination that allows the reader to contextualize each and every one of the characters that make up this choral novel, among which a zooarchaeologist stands out, who is asked to find the bones of the aforementioned historical horses; a white-collar thief; an illusionist; a scientist specialized in gene editing; and an eminent veterinarian, “a figure who almost always appears in my books and that I like to claim.”
Also one of the richest emirs in the world. “It was necessary for one of the protagonists to have a lot of money, because only then could he put the rest on the ropes so that they would rethink ethics and limits, two themes very present in the novel. “He is a character who is obsessed with Saladin and with preserving a gene bank with the best-known historical horse breeds in the world, so he will be accompanied by a great team of scientists.” “We have seen cloning recently with Milei’s dogs”, copies of Conan, the dog that lived with the Argentine president until 2017. “It doesn’t seem at all bad to me that he did it. It is another reproduction technique. Of course, as long as it is used with animals. The rest, let it remain only for fiction,” he concludes.
