Review: The Horse Without a Head, by Paul Berna

Review: The Horse Without a Head, by Paul Berna

by Rich Horton

At an estate sale recently, whose deceased owner clearly had interesting taste, I saw a copy of The Horse Without a Head, for 50 cents (about what it cost in the first place) and it was just intriguing enough to buy. It was a Scholastic edition, so a children's book (really what we'd now call Young Adult though the primary character are between about 10 and 13.) And the writer was French. And, as I quickly learned, the book became a Disney movie for television -- Disney's Wonderful World of Color series -- in 1963. The movie -- called The Horse Without a Head -- appears to be fairly well regarded, though it's not well known at all.

Paul Berna was the pseudonym used for his fiction by Jean-Marie-Edmond Sabran (1908-1994), a French journalist who wrote novels mostly for children. He did publish a few science fiction novels, the best known probably a diptych published in 1954 and 1955: Threshold of the Stars and Continent in the Sky. The Horse Without a Head was published in French in 1955 as Le Cheval Sans Tête, which actually does mean The Horse Without a Head. The English translation, by John Buchanan-Brown, was first title One Hundred Million Francs in 1957, but my Scholastic edition, presumably in response to the movie, is called The Horse Without a Head. My copy is the first Scholastic edition, from 1964. It is illustrated by Jon Nielsen.

The title horse is a play horse, stretched over a sort of tricycle frame, the head of which has fallen off. A group of ten children from a grubby Paris suburb called Louvigny play with with -- riding dangerously down a steep street, heedless of traffic and pedestrians. It is shortly after the end of the Second World War, and there is evidence of the war around -- bomb craters and such. The kids are poor, but seem pretty happy, though it's clear their parents are struggling to get by. Most of the adults tolerate the kids, but the police sometimes harass them, and a couple of merchants object to the occasional upsetting of their products.

The most prominent kids are Gaby, the oldest, and the gang's leader; Fernand; and Marion, a girl of about 12 who is beloved by all the dogs in the town. Berna lightly sketches these kids in a believable way, and the portrayal of their lives and their parents is down to Earth and seems a quite honest look at working class life in postwar France. 

One day the horse crashes, and the frame is broken. Fernand's father has a friend who can fix it, and shortly after it is fixed, some suspicious characters begin to ask the children to sell it to them for a fairly exorbitant price. But they aren't interested, and things turn more threatening. Eventually the horse is stolen. The kids complain to the police, who don't take them too seriously, and they also find another place to play -- an abandoned factory.

Meanwhile the police are complaining that they never get any action, or chance for promotion, even though there was recently a robbery of the train that runs through the town, in which 100,000,000 francs* were stolen. It seems clear that the suspicious folks hanging around are probably the criminals, and they must be looking for the the loot. Could the horse be involved somehow? And then Fernand realizes that in the junk recovered from the horse's hollow frame when it was recovered, there was a key. 

No need to detail the ending. It involves the key, of course, and some bumbling thieves, and the sort of bumbling police, and the kids' new hiding place, and Marion's dogs. It's really quite nicely done. As I said -- a believable portrayal of life in a Paris slum (for want of a nicer word), and a bunch of decent kids making their childhood special. The actual details of the crime and the way the children thwart it may not be wholly plausible, but that doesn't really matter. Worth the time.

*100,000,000 francs is stated to be worth about $200,000, which seemed awfully small to me -- but it turns out that that is about right for the exchange rate between francs and dollars around 1950.