The Boy Who Stole Attila’s Horse by Iván Repila review – a provocative allegory

Two young brothers are trapped down a well. But who put them there? And what do they stand for?

In this short, intense novel (translated from Spanish by Sophie Hughes), two young brothers are trapped down a well. The relationship between them is schematic; they are Big and Small. They are children but they also carry a heavy freight of allegory. While their desperate situation drives the narrative – the cold and wet, their pitiful scrabbling for food – realism is not the order of the day, but rather the distorted, disturbing exaggerations of expressionism. Who put the boys down the well and why? Answers are hinted at, anchoring the text in some semblance of conventional plot and resolution, but the author is much more interested in exploring metaphors of suffering and endurance, subjecting the smaller boy, in particular, to extremes of mental and physical distress. For the publishers it’s “a brave, original allegory of our modern world”, suggesting, perhaps inevitably, “our almost unending capacity for hope”. But the text itself resists such a neat interpretation. What hope there is is tentative, and the book’s provocative epigraphs from Margaret Thatcher and Bertolt Brecht suggest a political agenda rather than a more universal statement about humanity.

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