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Tivington Nott
Based on the lives of real people in Somerset on the borders of Exmoor, Miller tells his own story of a young labourer swept up in the adventure of riding second horse in a west country stag hunt. Finding himself in a closed social system in which he has neither status nor power, the young man identifies with the aberrant Tivington nott stag, which, despite its lack of antlers, has become a legend in the district for its ability to elude the hunt and to compete successfully with the antlered stags.
'This meditation on the condition of wildness, on being an outsider, is one of the most original pieces of writing of the year.' - Melbourne Herald
'An extraordinarily gripping novel.' - Melbourne Times
'Altogether brilliant. This man knows his hunting country.' - Somerset County Gazette
'This meditation on the condition of wildness, on being an outsider, is one of the most original pieces of writing of the year.' - Melbourne Herald
'An extraordinarily gripping novel.' - Melbourne Times
'Altogether brilliant. This man knows his hunting country.' - Somerset County Gazette
180 pages, Kindle Edition
First published November 1, 2005
5 people are currently reading
42 people want to read
About the author
Alex Miller
28 books150 followersAlex Miller is one of Australia's best-loved writers, and winner of the Melbourne Prize for Literature 2012.
Alex Miller is twice winner of Australia's premier literary prize, The Miles Franklin Literary Award, first in 1993 for The Ancestor Game and again in 2003 for Journey to the Stone Country. He is also an overall winner of the Commonwealth Writers' Prize, in 1993 for The Ancestor Game. His fifth novel, Conditions of Faith, won the Christina Stead Prize for Fiction in the 2001 New South Wales Premier's Awards. In 2011 he won this award a second time with his most recent novel Lovesong. Lovesong also won the People's Choice Award in the NSW Premier's Awards, the Age Book of the Year Award and the Age Fiction Prize for 2011. In 2007 Landscape of Farewell was published to wide critical acclaim and in 2008 won the Chinese Annual Foreign Novels 21st Century Award for Best Novel and the Manning Clark Medal for an outstanding contribution to Australian cultural life. It was also short-listed for the Miles Franklin Award, the Christina Stead Prize for Fiction, the ALS Gold Medal and the Commonwealth Writers' Prize. Alex is published internationally and widely in translation. Autumn Laing is his tenth novel.
Alex Miller is twice winner of Australia's premier literary prize, The Miles Franklin Literary Award, first in 1993 for The Ancestor Game and again in 2003 for Journey to the Stone Country. He is also an overall winner of the Commonwealth Writers' Prize, in 1993 for The Ancestor Game. His fifth novel, Conditions of Faith, won the Christina Stead Prize for Fiction in the 2001 New South Wales Premier's Awards. In 2011 he won this award a second time with his most recent novel Lovesong. Lovesong also won the People's Choice Award in the NSW Premier's Awards, the Age Book of the Year Award and the Age Fiction Prize for 2011. In 2007 Landscape of Farewell was published to wide critical acclaim and in 2008 won the Chinese Annual Foreign Novels 21st Century Award for Best Novel and the Manning Clark Medal for an outstanding contribution to Australian cultural life. It was also short-listed for the Miles Franklin Award, the Christina Stead Prize for Fiction, the ALS Gold Medal and the Commonwealth Writers' Prize. Alex is published internationally and widely in translation. Autumn Laing is his tenth novel.
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Displaying 1 - 14 of 14 reviews
April 2, 2015
I loved this memoir from Alex Miller. Couldn't put down. Found it to be very touching. I am an avid fan of his writing.
December 9, 2018
A very intense episode in the life of a West Country farm labourer, a microcosm exquisitely picked out in a detail as effortless and uncontrived as it is precise and atmospheric. It is the occasion of his blooding in a hunt - a hunt he would not be attending except for Kabara, a magnificent stallion whose perfections are to be demonstrated to potential buyers. The social strictures and niceties, the traditions and expectations as viewed by the exclamatory innocent (never seen so many exclamation marks anywhere else) revelling in the exhilarating adventure with a superlative horse, against the wild and unpredictable Exmoor. Tightly written with great compassion and insight.
January 14, 2017
Picked it off the shelf based on cover photo, that the author was Australian, has won the Miles Franklin and that it was set in Somerset which I would like to visit sometime. I liked it a lot and will now read others by Miller. He has a very direct and quick to read style but leaves impressions of deeper themes.
April 16, 2018
My first impression of this book is that it is a long way from the Alex Miller I know so well from many of his other novels.
For a start this is set in England not Australia, and recalls a time after Miller had left London as a sixteen year old and gone to work on a farm in Somerset in the West of England.
It is a short book, some 168 pages in my version, and of those about 100 relate to a long day of hunting a stag across the Somerset countryside. The hunt is related in great detail, the hounds and the huntsmen and the ever changing landscape of river valleys, steep hillsides, hidden combe valleys and flat hill tops. The excitement builds as riders and hounds get closer and closer to the stag, although it is rarely seen. The young boy, narrated in the first person, is riding a horse called Kabara which is owned by a man who has moved to Somerset from Australia. The horse is for sale and the boy's boss, Tiger, is keen to buy it. The young Miller has been looking after the horse and has developed a relationship, an understanding, is perhaps ta better word. He is to ride it in the hunt as a second horse for Tiger. But Kabara has other ideas, he is too headstrong, and the young rider perhaps too inexperienced, to keep his strength in check. At times you have the sense that the rider is simply trying to stay on rather, than ride and guide the horse in any way. Kabara is too headstrong to be fully controlled.
There is just enough background to set the scene. Enough about everyday life as a young labourer, enough to understand that he is seen as a foreigner, from out of town, and not wise to everything that happens around the place. Others pick on him at harvest time, trying to make his job harder. Tiger and his wife also seem to have some resentment of him being there. But when he gets to take the horse out alone on the hills, he is the one that discovers the secret lair of the Tivington nott, a stag without antlers that every local would like to hunt down. It is a beast of mythical status but the young lad never lets on his secret. The stag they hunt is not this one, but another with many points. Against this background of being the outsider and the lad to be picked on, Miller sets the great day of the hunt when he comes into his own.
And so it is that the young Alex Miller is there as only one of five riders to witness the death of the stag, five of the very best from the hunt. It would certainly be an event and a memory that would stick in the mind for ever. He is telling of events forty years after they happened but you know from the details and the passion that they are as fresh in his mind as the day they took place.
For a start this is set in England not Australia, and recalls a time after Miller had left London as a sixteen year old and gone to work on a farm in Somerset in the West of England.
It is a short book, some 168 pages in my version, and of those about 100 relate to a long day of hunting a stag across the Somerset countryside. The hunt is related in great detail, the hounds and the huntsmen and the ever changing landscape of river valleys, steep hillsides, hidden combe valleys and flat hill tops. The excitement builds as riders and hounds get closer and closer to the stag, although it is rarely seen. The young boy, narrated in the first person, is riding a horse called Kabara which is owned by a man who has moved to Somerset from Australia. The horse is for sale and the boy's boss, Tiger, is keen to buy it. The young Miller has been looking after the horse and has developed a relationship, an understanding, is perhaps ta better word. He is to ride it in the hunt as a second horse for Tiger. But Kabara has other ideas, he is too headstrong, and the young rider perhaps too inexperienced, to keep his strength in check. At times you have the sense that the rider is simply trying to stay on rather, than ride and guide the horse in any way. Kabara is too headstrong to be fully controlled.
There is just enough background to set the scene. Enough about everyday life as a young labourer, enough to understand that he is seen as a foreigner, from out of town, and not wise to everything that happens around the place. Others pick on him at harvest time, trying to make his job harder. Tiger and his wife also seem to have some resentment of him being there. But when he gets to take the horse out alone on the hills, he is the one that discovers the secret lair of the Tivington nott, a stag without antlers that every local would like to hunt down. It is a beast of mythical status but the young lad never lets on his secret. The stag they hunt is not this one, but another with many points. Against this background of being the outsider and the lad to be picked on, Miller sets the great day of the hunt when he comes into his own.
And so it is that the young Alex Miller is there as only one of five riders to witness the death of the stag, five of the very best from the hunt. It would certainly be an event and a memory that would stick in the mind for ever. He is telling of events forty years after they happened but you know from the details and the passion that they are as fresh in his mind as the day they took place.
March 7, 2018
I've always loved the film 'The Belstone Fox', which in turn encouraged my vociferous opposition to fox hunting. I wondered, from the jacket blurb, whether this would be a similar story of a cunning quarry outsmarting the hounds. Well, it is, but not in the way I'd hoped. It's really a story of a young man and a big black horse which he rides in a stag hunt on Exmoor. There's a lot of local politicking about who'll get to buy the fabulous stallion, and a strong sense that the protagonist doesn't fit in with the yokels (he's even been to that Lunnon Town). However, the main lure of the book is the vividly realised stag hunt, which has great brio and is extremely evocative (if you like books about large packs of dogs and horses chasing a single animal...it's that English Sense of Fair Play again).
What annoyed me about the book was its style, which is a kind of D.H. Lawrence-lite. There's barely a relative clause in the book, just a lot of exclamation marks and sentences beginning with 'And' ('Look! we have come through!' as DHL might say). You therefore get an awful lot of this sort of thing:
The sun is golden on the bracken. Yes, golden! We wheel away across the hill-side. And there we are, down in Brickley Bottom! Up ahead, Lord Brimington signals a halt. Dogs run hither and yon, panting, snarling. They have the scent. And I'm out here with them!
It's all so breathless, especially when narrated from someone on the back of a galloping horse. Frankly, it's wearying and were it not for the neat resolution of the 'who'll buy the horse?' plot, rather tedious. However, it was a breath of fresh air after my usual noir, horror, and weirdness.
What annoyed me about the book was its style, which is a kind of D.H. Lawrence-lite. There's barely a relative clause in the book, just a lot of exclamation marks and sentences beginning with 'And' ('Look! we have come through!' as DHL might say). You therefore get an awful lot of this sort of thing:
The sun is golden on the bracken. Yes, golden! We wheel away across the hill-side. And there we are, down in Brickley Bottom! Up ahead, Lord Brimington signals a halt. Dogs run hither and yon, panting, snarling. They have the scent. And I'm out here with them!
It's all so breathless, especially when narrated from someone on the back of a galloping horse. Frankly, it's wearying and were it not for the neat resolution of the 'who'll buy the horse?' plot, rather tedious. However, it was a breath of fresh air after my usual noir, horror, and weirdness.
December 11, 2022
This was such an interesting book. I wasn't sure what to expect knowing it is the first novel Alex Miller wrote (published second). The language is quite different to a typical Miller novel, but no lesser in terms of depth of storytelling and insight.
It's a mystical account of a deer hunt to the point where the reader is sucked into a religious ceremony that must play itself out. And the protagonist (Alex himself?) is only let into the ritual at the moment when he's needed by the cultists, a sacrificial lamb as it were. A very enjoyable read and fast paced, too!
It's a mystical account of a deer hunt to the point where the reader is sucked into a religious ceremony that must play itself out. And the protagonist (Alex himself?) is only let into the ritual at the moment when he's needed by the cultists, a sacrificial lamb as it were. A very enjoyable read and fast paced, too!
October 17, 2017
An interesting plot and subject matter. A book that I had in my shelf for a long time and have now finally completed it, cover to cover. Glad I made the effort!
October 28, 2024
My friend Di gave me this to read. She loved it. Usually I am yes for Alex Miller but this one - too much about the animals and not about people. And the hunt. Not my kind of thing.
April 24, 2009
A very different book set in rural Devon. The story is superficially about deer hunting but is ostensibly a discussion of class, social aspirations and the lot of a labourer. It sounds boring and brutal but is neither and had me gripped from the first line "The Dr told Morris he shouldn't eat so much raw pig fat. It'd probably kill him before he was forty".
July 5, 2013
Some beautiful writing but the topic of this book, an English hunt, didn't sustain me. It captured a moment in time and my empathy was for the horse Kabara but I was glad when it was over. Worst of human nature revealed but the best of animals.
Currently reading
June 30, 2012Just started this, picked it up on sale at Dymocks. I love Ale Miller and this is a very early one. Will let you know. Stil haven't read Autumn Laing which I am looking forward to.
July 27, 2016
Sadly, I found this book to be a disappointment but I think that was purely because the subject matter did not interest me.
March 25, 2015
Not my cup of tea but well written. A good insight into social status and hierarchies
May 2, 2017
An enjoyable memoir of this iconic Australian writer, Alex Miller, about his time on a Somerset farm in his youth. The pace of the story slowly gains momentum until one is fully engrossed in the excitement of the deer chase on the back of Kabara, a well bred thoroughbred owned by an Australian.
At times there were too many characters ... but then there were loads of men ... and a woman, involved in the chase.
At times there were too many characters ... but then there were loads of men ... and a woman, involved in the chase.
Displaying 1 - 14 of 14 reviews