A book about a “foolish man…who buys a young horse” is how Lawrence Scanlan sums up his part memoir, part history of a little known aspect of Canadiana, le cheval canadien. At age 50 Scanlan bought his first horse, the Canadian heritage breed dubbed “the little horse of iron” by the Habitant. It was the Sun King, Louis XIV, who originally sent 27 of these beasts to New France. Farm animal, war horse, first-rate trail horse – they are even stronger and more versatile than the better known Percherons and Clydesdales.

With access to the considerable files of Ontario librarian Patricia Cooper, Scanlan interweaves a history of the breed with his own 18-month diary of what it was like to train Dali, his little horse of iron. Scanlan becomes a “barn rat,” gathering horse sense from the many knowledgeable breeders he meets in his travels throughout Ontario and Quebec.

There’s an interesting chapter on horse racing, and an informative later section called “The Canadian Hall of Fame,” where Scanlan pays homage to the great Canadian horses of the past. There’s even a section on how well the great Canadian horse has fared under the paintbrush of Krieghoff, the great Canadian landscape artist.

However, there can be too much of a good thing. Much of the diary’s detail, as well as the book’s historical sections, is insignificant to the main storyline – the “marriage” of the “green rider” to the “green horse.” The ending is also needlessly ambiguous: Scanlan, with his bruised body, begins to compare Dali to “a sharp knife I have too often mishandled.” The green rider seems to have had enough, but we never learn whether the marriage ends in divorce or not. Instead we get an epilogue on who really owns the Canadian horse, Quebec or Canada. In the context of both the book and the country, this final conclusion seems decidedly out of place.