Book Review: Tam the Untamed

Title: Tam the Untamed

Author: Mary Elwyn Patchett

Date: 1955

Publisher: Bobbs-Merrill

ISBN: none

Length: 186 pages

Illustrations: drawings by Gerald McCann

Quote: “If anything could have made the idea of the foal more exciting to me, it was to be told that he was the son of Bobs...probably the most famous buckjumper of all.”

In the introduction Mary Elwyn Patchett explains the horse stories in this book as memories from the same years as the dog stories in her previous book Ajax, but claims that writing the stories in the order they happened meant that “the powerful personalities of” alpha dog Ajax and alpha horse Tam “seemed to be continually overshadowing”  memories of her beta dogs. I'm not entirely convinced. The books were published as fiction, and followed by at least one adventure story published in the U.S. that reads like pure, polished, fiction. Nevertheless, the narrative in Ajax and Tam the Untamed is unpolished enough that it does sound like mostly true memoirs, “improved” no doubt, but fact-based. It's possible that Patchett always intended to market the dog stories to dog lovers and the horse stories to horse lovers.

It may be significant, given the way horse and dog stories were marketed in the 1950s, that fictional Mary mentions an older brother in Ajax but never mentions this brother in Tam the Untamed, just as she never mentions Tam in Ajax. Dog stories were supposed to appeal to boys, so they had to have a boy character; horse stories were supposed to appeal to girls, so in them a girl character could share center stage with her horse alone—although in Tam the Untamed Ajax emerges as the rescuing hero and Tam, like his namesake, more of a tragic hero.

I remember discovering both these not-quite-novels, not-quite memoirs at age eight, or maybe even seven, which was about the right age to enjoy them. I knew they weren't quite as well written as other books that were either fiction or nonfiction, but at that age the fact that they weren't really coherent novels, nor were they separate short stories, nor were they credible memoirs, didn't bother me at all. If the more dramatic stories weren't likely to be true, I felt, they ought to have been. Shouldn't every child whose pet has been stolen get a chance to roar at a hard-drinking rodeo crowd, “If you move one step, my dog will tear that beast's throat out, and then I'll set him on you!”? Shouldn't every child who's been bullied at school be able to beat up two bullies at once, and be commended for it, even, in a subtle way, by teachers?

Patchett presents herself in this book as a de facto only child on a large farm “on the border river between New South Wales and Queensland.” She doesn't know, or want to know, children her own age; the brother, and any other siblings that may have been left offstage in the stories, would have been much older, so when she has to go to school for a month the teachers don't know how to deal with her—a child who's intelligent and mostly polite, having been socialized so exclusively by adults, but ignorant of “book learning” and socially backward around other children. Apparently nobody's ever thought of anything to do with this fictional Mary but give her more of what she wants—freedom, including the freedom to go camping in the bush, all alone with her two less than fully safe pets, for a week if she feels like it.

So in this story Mary spoils Tam in much the same way. From a dear little orphan foal he quickly grows into a big strong athletic horse who's never quite free to develop his potential as either a race horse, a show “buckjumper,” or the leader of a wild horse herd. In some rodeos “bucking broncos” are abused, as shown in this book, until they really go wild and want to harm riders, but according to Mary the horse Bobs was humanely trained to put on a hard-to-ride act, using one of those special moves that a minority of horses seem to do naturally; skill at these performances seems to correlate with hereditary physical traits, and Bobs seems to have passed on his “buckjumping” talents to Tam. Although he's only a mixed breed, Tam shares his color, and possibly the advantages of his conformation, with the Lipizzan dancing horses. 

Mary feels his frustration. Toward the end of the book, does she ever feel it! Rescuing Tam from a horse thief, she frustrates Tam's efforts to rescue himself, and he starts to vent his aggressions on Mary. Immediately after Mary has rounded on that rodeo crowd like Jesus driving the moneychangers out of the Temple, Ajax has to rescue Mary from Tam. And although the melodrama of Mary's reclaiming Tam has to have been exaggerated, that an overexcited animal, or even human, should immediately attack its rescuer is not unusual; that part I believe.

What the story has in the way of a plot may be that learning from the mistakes she's made with Tam reconciles Mary to turning him over to men who can work with a horse like him (maybe), going off to school, and learning to relate to other half-grown girls—but the story doesn't say this. Patchett leaves adult readers free to infer it, from the timeline of the story, and child readers free to leave Mary, Tam, and Ajax alone together, for the moment, all calmed down and friends again. In real life horse stories like Tam's don't have very happy endings, but this book stops tactfully short of whatever ending Tam's story might have had.

All I can say is that somehow, when I went back to reread Tam the Untamed for you, I realized that I'd read that plot into the story. I remembered that Tam teaches Mary her mistakes with harsh physical punishment, twice. As a child I probably wouldn't have enjoyed the book if it had ever actually said “So then my parents, brother, and favorite farm laborer convinced me that the relatively humane 'showman' who'd worked with Bobs was the one who could save Tam from a forlorn, unnatural, neurotic life, and that at least a few years of school might save me from something similar; a deal was worked out, and Tam helped to pay my tuition fees.” As an adult, I reopened the book having worked out in my mind that that was how it must have ended...but no. “[O]nce again the long,happy days began for the little girl who was part animal, and the animals who were nearly human.”

There's a lot to be said for a human character, if only a fictional one, who appreciates “that no animal should be forced into a human pattern” clearheadedly enough to understand, when one of her pets hurts her, that the animal is not “bad” but is correcting her mistake. Around the time I read Tam the Untamed I had a few firsthand experiences of horses correcting stupid human mistakes, not by real threat displays like Tam's, but just chomping a finger curled up around a food treat, or stepping on a misplaced foot...I suspect that's why I never became really horsey. Anyone with spare time can bond with horses, but actually working with them takes a talent for nonverbal communication, and also a certain tolerance for pain. I thought about this and became more appreciative of smaller, safer animals.

And after all, the way I'd misremembered Tam the Untamed isn't the only possible happy ending Tam's story could have had, although Patchett does mention on page 127 that “I knew I would be sent to boarding school.” There was also Mary O'Hara's Thunderhead, where the alpha horse who knows one human friend, but no master, gets to go feral in peace. Fictional Mary does more of the things real children dream of doing than any fictional human-child protagonist I can remember, verging on the pure fantasies of Mowgli, Tarzan, or Pippi, but obviously the real Mary Elwyn Patchett did settle down into human society; that does not necessarily mean that Tam did.

Let's just say that if ever a book communicated to a child the message that children shouldn't have their own way all the time, without actually saying it, Tam the Untamed is that book. In that peculiar way this rambly little half-breed of a book remains the most successful book I've ever read.

If this triumph of subtlety weren't enough to make Tam the Untamed worth keeping, we also meet the rest of Mary's menagerie, two more dogs, a monkey, an Australian possum, a tame snake, a kangaroo (rescued from an abusive “showman” in Ajax), a cat, a lizard, a tortoise, a duck, lambs, all of whom have become pets and can even be treated to a party together if “carefully watched,” and a “flying fox” bat she completely fails to tame. Naturally some of these animals are more interesting than others; the domestic dogs get the most attention, but what imaginative child could possibly ignore a book with a tame kangaroo in it?

This is a collectors' book; the best price we can offer is $10 per book + $5 per package + $1 per online payment, and Patchett no longer has any use for the $1 we'd sent her if it were A Fair Trade Book. However, at least three more books of this size will fit into the package beside this one, and they can be Fair Trade Books if you like.