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Tag Archives: Geraldine Brooks

This Blog Is One Year Old Today

27 Tuesday Oct 2015

Posted by Novelhistorian in Reviews and Columns

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

Andrew W. Taylor, Ann Weisgarber, Colm Toíbín, Geraldine Brooks, Helen Dunmore, historical fiction, Jean-Christophe Rufin, Jerome Charyn, John Spurling, Laila Lalami, Lily King, Mary Morris, Robert Harris

A year ago today, I published my first review as Novelhistorian. My thanks go to all my readers, regular or casual, with a special nod to those who’ve graced their visits with commentary. Without all of you, this blog wouldn’t exist. Thank you again.

When I was growing up in the New York area, a local TV channel broadcast Million Dollar Movie, a program that showed a single film continuously for hours at a stretch. The theme song, as I only found out years later, was from Gone With the Wind; I still think of it as belonging to the TV program. The movies were generally the swash-and-buckle type, like Scaramouche or The Crimson Pirate (Burt Lancaster in a title role he probably preferred to forget). It’s thanks to Million Dollar Movie that I can quote stretches of Duck Soup, without which my education would have been incomplete, or vividly recall James Cagney playing George M. Cohan and Errol Flynn as Robin Hood.

Each showing of a movie closed with the voiceover, “If you missed any part of ________ or would like to see it again, stay tuned after these messages.”

So that’s what I’m offering you today. After reading about a hundred books the past year, the following dozen are the ones that have stayed with me most clearly and probably will for awhile. And if you missed my reviews (or care to read them again), here they are, in recap, with links, following the order in which I published them.

The Lie, by Helen Dunmore, recounts the painful, tragic struggle of an English veteran of the First World War who returns to his village and tries to make a life. The Anatomy of Ghosts, by Andrew W. Taylor, involves an eighteenth-century amateur sleuth who must combat superstition, class prejudice, and political influence to solve a murder–and grows as a person in the process.

The Dream Maker, by Jean-Christophe Rufin, is a gripping tale about Jacques Coeur, the fifteenth-century French merchant who not only helped Charles VII transform his country but conceived of power as stemming from knowledge, a revolutionary idea. I Am Abraham is Jerome Charyn’s stirring portrayal of Lincoln as a man conscious of his physical ugliness and tortured by loneliness and desire as he tries to find his way.

An Officer and a Spy, Robert Harris’s novel about the Dreyfus Affair, is more than an intensely compelling story about the most infamous political scandal in nineteenth-century French history (and there were many). It’s also the gold standard for thrillers. The Ten Thousand Things, John Spurling’s novel about Yuan Dynasty China, explores art, sex, love, justice, and politics–you know, the important stuff. For the record, it won this year’s Walter Scott Prize. Colm Toíbín’s subtle, probing Nora Webster, set in 1960s Ireland, takes a commonplace subject, widowhood, and makes it into literary art of the first order.

Jazz Palace, Mary Morris’s lovely rendition of Chicago jazz during the Twenties, captures the era and two of its walking wounded in a hard-edged, deeply felt romance. In The Promise, Ann Weisgarber spins a keenly observed, taut love story of 1900 Galveston, about two people who can see past surfaces and the jealousies that surround them.

The Moor’s Account, by Laila Lalami, follows the disastrous sixteenth-century Narváez expedition to the Gulf of Mexico, as viewed by its most adept (but socially and culturally invisible) member. Lily King’s Euphoria follows a love triangle among anthropologists in New Guinea in 1931, based on Margaret Mead’s life, in a retelling of exceptional breadth, psychological insight, and power.

Finally, The Secret Chord, Geraldine Brooks’s recent novel, recounts the rise of King David, as told by his prophet and trusted adviser, Natan. Like The Dream Maker, I Am Abraham, and An Officer and a Spy, Brooks manages to infuse edge-of-the-seat tension into a narrative whose events are no surprise.

Here’s to another year of good reading.

Harsh Necessity: The Secret Chord

12 Monday Oct 2015

Posted by Novelhistorian in Reviews and Columns

≈ 3 Comments

Tags

adultery, Bible, bloodshed, civilization, David, dramatic tension, Geraldine Brooks, historical fiction, Israel, Nathan, prophecy, Pulitzer Prize, Solomon, Tanakh

Review: The Secret Chord, by Geraldine Brooks
Viking, 2015. 302 pp. $28

The stories are so well known they’re common metaphors. When one person, athletic team, or military force faces a much larger, stronger opponent, we talk of David confronting Goliath. If we hear of adultery that leads to murder, the case evokes David and Bathsheba. Everyone knows, too, how the first king of Israel was a celebrated warrior, political leader, poet, musician, and judge, yet how a prophet’s rebuke made him repent while at the height of his power.

The Tel Dan stele, one piece of archeological evidence for David's kingdom (Courtesy Wikimedia Commons).

The Tel Dan stele, one piece of archeological evidence for David’s kingdom (Courtesy Wikimedia Commons).

Or maybe not, if you read this magnificent, powerful, intensely gripping novel, which reimagines the biblical hero in his glory and fatal flaws. Brooks shows David’s daring, passion, devotion, ability to listen, grasp of military and political strategy, his occasional efforts to restrain the blood lust of the age, and his unmatched singing voice, beautiful verse, and cries of rage or grief. In other words, she explores why people followed, loved, and believed in him, and how he forged a kingdom out of warring tribes, but also why his vanity, arrogance, sexual appetites, and blindness to misdeeds (his own and his favorites’) caused so much misery and jeopardized his entire enterprise. Perhaps most important, the bloodshed and cruelty that David calls necessary to create a strong central government and, thereby, curtail unnecessary bloodshed and cruelty, keeps circling through the narrative, just as it has circled throughout human history.

How does Brooks manage to convey all this while sustaining the tension of a story written thousands of years ago? On first reading, I see several ways. First, though David is the object of everyone’s attention, he’s not the protagonist; Natan, his conscience, is. (Throughout, Brooks uses Hebrew names for people and places.) Like all prophets, Natan often wishes he didn’t have his gift, which keeps him from living like other men and evokes a mixture of fear, awe, disbelief, and misunderstanding.

However, it also saves his life. When David, then a rebel outlaw, puts a village to the sword for having refused to share food with his soldiers, the ten-year-old Natan watches his father die. Then it’s Natan’s turn, whereupon he falls into a fit and pronounces the fateful prophecy of great things. Naturally, the soldiers think it’s a performance, if brilliantly done; they don’t believe what they can’t see or touch. But David brings the fledgling seer into his household, where he eventually becomes a trusted adviser, and you get the idea that it’s not just David’s ego that has guided him but his talent for seeing beyond surfaces.

Even so, for Natan, his calling cuts more than one way. First, intense physical and emotional anguish always presage and accompany his prophetic utterances, so that he’s completely outside himself and can’t hear his own words. If it happens among other people, he can only find out what he’s said after he recovers, though meanwhile, he sees how his listeners react. That separation puts him at a disadvantage. Secondly, though his status protects him, when Natan speaks to the king and the generals in his own guise, he’s risking his neck, especially if they think he’s criticizing them. It’s a delicate balance for Natan, who must resist the temptation to pretend that certain words come from God when they don’t, and he can be sure that these powerful men will ask. Further, contrary to what they assume, he doesn’t see how things will come to be, only what will be. Consequently, his presence at their councils creates tension, as do his divided feelings, and much rides on what he chooses to say or keep to himself.

The narrative of course grows much flesh on the bones of an oft-told story, but Brooks never lets her inventiveness betray her characters. For instance, how she shows David winning his epic combat with a slingshot, or how she explains why Batsheva was bathing on her roof, make perfect sense for the people involved. You know that these things will happen, but you don’t know how, or how people will view them, and that adds drama as well.

Then there’s the prose, though which Brooks re-creates an ancient landscape and ways of thought until you can practically touch them. Take this example, when Natan leaves his burning, corpse-ridden village forever, his father yet unburied, and his mother refuses to say goodbye:

I felt, in her shunning, the first of many turnings-away. It was hard for a child to feel that ebbing love, to sense an estrangement that I could do nothing to gainsay. For my part, I still loved her as much as I had the moment before my mouth opened and the words poured out of me. But like the leper when the first lesion darkens and pits his skin, I was marked in her eyes, blemished, unlovable.

As for quibbles, I do wish Brooks had scrapped the prologue; I dislike them, and they feel gimmicky. The narrative switches time perspectives, leaving me in the dust on occasion, though I caught up soon enough. Finally, when the five-year-old Shlomo (Solomon) speaks words that he’d later set down in Ecclesiastes, that feels a bit precious, much as I love their wisdom. He’s a prodigy, sure, but it’s actually more meaningful that Brooks stresses David’s vanity, a subtle contrast with the philosophy that his son would later express.

This is the fourth novel of Brooks’s I’ve read (see my review of Year of Wonders, January 5). But I like this one the best of any, and I wouldn’t be surprised if The Secret Chord, like March, earned her a Pulitzer Prize.

Disclaimer: I obtained my reading copy of this book from the public library.

Creative Destruction

05 Monday Jan 2015

Posted by Novelhistorian in Reviews and Columns

≈ 3 Comments

Tags

Albert Camus, bubonic, Derbyshire, England, Geraldine Brooks, plague, scientific revolution, seventeenth century, superstition

Review
Geraldine Brooks, Year of Wonders: A Novel of the Plague
Penguin, 2002. 304 pp. $16

Where, you may ask, can you find wonder in a novel about a bubonic plague epidemic that causes apocalyptic losses and prompts superstitious people to destroy each other?

Yet wonder there is, and a tiny Derbyshire village in 1666 becomes the water droplet in which a microscope reveals the world. Anna Frith, a young widow who supplements her meager living by serving the rector as housemaid, throws herself into the tasks imposed by a lethal disease that nobody understands. Apprenticing herself to the charismatic, tireless, and moody Rector Mompellion and his thoughtful wife, Elinor, Anna comforts the dying, mourns the dead, and tries to protect the survivors from each other–when she can.

Paul Fürst, engraving, c. 1721, of a plague doctor of Marseilles. His nose-case is filled with smoking material to keep off the plague.

A plague doctor, Marseilles, from an engraving by Paul Fürst, about 1721. The beak contains material thought to ward off the disease. (Courtesy Wikipedia.)

Through these thankless, seemingly pitiful efforts, Anna creates a wonder: herself. In this hottest of crucibles, she tests her abilities, courage, fears, religious beliefs, and ideas about love, tempering her character and soul. Year of Wonders is a coming-of-age story, among other things, and seldom have I read such an intelligent, unsparing, limpidly written, and satisfying one as this.

A novel with this background reminds me of Albert Camus’s philosophical masterpiece, The Plague, in which Dr. Rieux, the hero, does all he can to combat the disease, though he knows his work has no effect. Camus’s plague is an allegory for Nazism, to which the only antidote is belief in humanity, feeble though that seems. (By the way, he wrote his first draft where Village of Secrets by Caroline Moorehead takes place. See my review, “The Just and Unjust,” December 15.)

Year of Wonders is, of course, a very different book, but Anna is herself a thinker, in her feet-in-the-soil way, and that, too, underlies the title. She repeatedly asks herself whether God sent the plague, and why, a prime question of the late seventeenth century, when Europeans were beginning to embrace scientific observation, not divine writ, as the key to deciphering the natural world. Her answers to this question change over time, and, fitting her character, occur in such ordinary moments as when she stubs her toe or takes a horse out for exercise. Though Brooks never makes this explicit–properly so–Anna, the rector, and Elinor represent the cusp of a frightening yet liberating discovery, the role of random chance. How they react to their gradual, hard-won insights makes this a rich, engrossing story.

Year of Wonders is the third Geraldine Brooks novel I’ve read, and, like the other two (Caleb’s Crossing; March), she shows a sure hand with the language, ways, and social beliefs of the time. However, I prefer this novel (her first), because it feels fuller, somehow, more compact and direct, elegant in its simple framework while exploiting its angles and surfaces. I had a little trouble with the narrative, at first, trying to figure out the sequence of events, but that soon resolved. The ending, though very satisfying, may not be entirely plausible, but I like its irony, and it reinforces what Brooks is trying to say.

I heartily recommend this book, which has given me a great deal to think about, as a reader and novelist.

Disclaimer: I borrowed my reading copy of this book from the public library.

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