Geraldine Brooks – The Secret Chord

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Bible, Biography as Fiction, Book Review, Geraldine Brooks, King David, The Secret Chord

The story of King David – warts and wonders

I was sent this as a digital copy for review from the publishers via NetGalley.

I have admired Pulitzer prizewinning author Geraldine Brooks’ writing since discovering her 2001 book The Year of Wonders. In The Secret Chord, she is up against a more challenging task in some ways, and yet perhaps an easier one in others.

This the story of King David, from Ancient – History? Allegorical Writing? The Bible, a Holy Book? Many interpretations might be possible.

My knowledge of David was scant – he became King, and Jesus came from ‘David’s Line’ so, clearly he is part of New Testament as well as Old Testament theology.

He was a psalmist, a musician, as well as a king, and many of the Psalms in the book of Psalms are his. He fathered Solomon, fount of wisdom, and one assumes the creator of another Biblical Book, The Song of Solomon, deeply poetic, and also erotic – the song can be read as physical or as spiritual in praise, and this tradition of praise to a divinity which also has elements which could be seen as erotic is one found in other poems of love to the divine. David was the young boy, of humble birth, who slayed Goliath, with a stone. David and the then king’s son, Jonathan, formed a deep friendship. David, who seems to be courageous, charismatic, devotional, and is perceived as a wise ruler, also coveted and raped Bathsheba, his general’s wife, and sent that general into dangerous battle, where he was killed.

David Cuts off the Head of Goliath by James Tissot, (1836-1902)

His almost seems to be an operatic, soap opera story. I found the Bible original, its 1st Book of Samuel Chapter 16 onwards, through the 2nd Book of Samuel and into the second chapter of the Book of Kings, because I was interested to see the source material she had worked from, and from whence a novelist’s imagination, or, even invention, might arise.

To be honest, it’s a fairly bleak and plain telling, and inevitably reads quite drily. (The Biblical telling)  The usual collection of intense smitings and smotings which litters the sometimes sorry history of our species. We do pretty well all of the smitings and the smotings ourselves, without the need of outside agencies, it seems, and utilise those agencies to justify ourselves.

As society becomes more secular (some societies, and I live in one) it perhaps becomes harder to write inside the mind-set of faith base, in a way which can allow readers outside faith to enter into characters and societies for whom it was central, without the reader judging the character as credulous or simple minded.

Brooks does flesh out this rather extraordinary life, and this rather extraordinary world, extremely well. The inevitable parallels to Mary Renault and what she did, particularly in her trilogy about Alexander the Great and the two Theseus books, are not misplaced, though Brooks doesn’t quite manage the hairs up on the back of the neck stuff, the bringing of that long ago time and its mixture of the familiar and the weird, so much into potent reality as Renault does.

David and Bathsheba Jean-Léon Gérôme, 1889

Brooks uses a couple of devices in the telling of her story, which a had a slight question mark about. She took the decision to use the original personal and place names ‘in their transliteration from the Hebrew of the Tanakh’ – so this means, instead of the versions bible readers – and more particularly non bible readers who have become familiar with the place and personal names which have passed into popular culture – are concerned. making the necessary connections may not be immediately obvious. For example, it was not until I found the source material that I realised that the Plishtim were the Philistines. I thought this decision, presumably to add a kind of historical authenticity was not helpful. It may be that a glossary will be included with the published, as opposed to the ARC copy. The combination of the archaic namings and the use of various period terms with the need at times, where she wants to show salty and foul language, such as used by soldiers, somehow grated. This is always a problem, people will always have used such language, how to marry the need for immediacy without losing a sense of place and time : the challenge of quaint and old fashioned versus something which wrests the reader out of period.

There are also decisions taken (which may or may not be accurate) but which leave the reader  (or did leave this reader) wondering how much a modern gloss, a modern viewpoint, is an accurate one, and how much we are unable to see, feel, think into other times. The most obvious, here is the relationship between Jonathan and David. We live in a world which is overtly sexualised; thus it becomes almost impossible for deep love by adults, between the same sex, or between the opposite sex, to be seen in any other way than actively sexual, or as a conscious or unconscious sexual repression. We may, or may not be far too knowing now to enter into a different time. So Brooks makes David a man of broad tastes. In which she may be right or she may not. There is no concrete knowing, either way. But this decision did also put me out of an inhabitation of the past, making me realise that, for example, a Victorian writing this story may very well have accepted a loving relationship between two men without sexualisation.

David and Jonathan Cima da Conegliano, 1507

She is not in any way salacious or gratuitous in her writing about sexual content – we never go into the bedroom, she does not need to do this, as she chooses the device of having the whole story told by the prophet Nathan :

I have had a great length of days and been many things. A reluctant warrior. A servant, a counselor. Sometimes, perhaps, his friend. And this, also, have I been: a hollow reed through which the breath of truth sounded its discordant notes.

Words. Words upon the wind. What will endure, perhaps, is what I have written. If so, it is enough.

Brooks is, as ever, a wonderful story teller, one who makes characters come alive, and one who writes wonderfully.

Going back to the source, she has given rich depth, life and colour to events which were set down and her David is complex, rounded, and as my title suggest, a man full of contradictions, as all humans are.

The Secret Chord Amazon UK
The Secret Chord Amazon USA

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Geraldine Brooks – Foreign Correspondence

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Australia, Autobiography, Book Review, Foreign Correspondence, Geraldine Brooks, Pen-Pals

Story of a life, the times, and the cultures

I came to this factual book by Geraldine Brooks hot on the heels of appreciation for her novel, People Of The Book. Brooks, now a Virginia resident novelist, was in a prior existence a globe-trotting, wanderlust-filled journalist originally from Concord, a suburb of Sydney, New South Wales.

Born in the mid-50s, Brooks recounts growing up in a deeply entrenched culture where nothing really happened, Australians felt second-class parochial citizens, looking to the ‘mother country’ with deep blue affiliations under Prime Minister Robert Menzies. The national anthem was even God Save The Queen. An underachieving, ‘don’t be a tall poppy’ syndrome was rife.

Brooks’ parents clearly had wider horizons in their souls, and she and her elder sister were clearly going to be taller poppies.

Desperate to know something of worlds beyond, Brooks began a series of correspondences with pen pals, from before her teens. Fed by initially a fascination with Star Wars, and then later with emerging socialist, internationalist and artistic interests, she had penfriends from firstly, a classier suburb of Sydney, from the States (where she always wanted to be) two pen-pals from Israel, a Christian Arab and a Jew, and a French girl from a tiny village.

Although she stopped writing to all of them bar her fellow Trekkie fan, the American girl, whilst still in her teens, a chance discovery of all the letters some 30 years later, led her to revisit her childhood, the zeitgeist of the times and the place, and trace the development not just of her own identity, life and viewpoints, but also look at how Australia emerged as a taller poppy.

She was also curious to discover what had happened to her several pen-pals, and set out to find them.

The several stories are moving, amusing, heart-breaking, and also surprisingly inspiring, not least for Brooks herself, who discovers that one life, which seemed on the surface to be the farthest away from the life she would want for herself, is one she comes full circle to most appreciate.

She is an excellent raconteur of the various stories and the changing voices from childhood to adult, ranging from Brooks, the budding young teenage scientist with a desire to solve the problem of world hunger through eating weeds – an experiment on mice which goes sadly wrong, to the much later discovery of a sad and long kept secret from her father’s life.

Flicr, Commons, Steve Beger

I can’t resist a little account from the exchanges between Brooks and her fellow Trekkie penpal, Joannie, about the mouse experiment :

I named one of the control mice Joannie, although since all were albinos I had difficulty in telling her apart from the others, Spock Rudolph and Margot (the latter two named for a balletomane phase I was passing through)……………..Unfortunately my Mr Spock met a grisly end, along with the noble attempt to alleviate world hunger…….The project fell apart when my mice – the control group, fed on the gourmet mouse mix – began eating each other. The day we gave away the sole – and very fat – survivor of my doomed experiment was a happy one for my mother. Joannie was consoling “Perhaps you just had paranoid mice.”

A lovely, absorbing read, which gave me some fascinating insights. And not just about cannibal mice.

Foreign Correspondence Amazon UK
Foreign Correspondence Amazon USA

Geraldine Brooks – People Of The Book

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Book Review, Geraldine Brooks, People of The Book, Sacred texts, Sarajevo Haggadah

Down all the dusty roads that lead toward home

Geraldine Brooks’ part modern part historical novel with a book within the book as the major ‘character’ is a fascinating if not completely successful read.

Brooks does historical, not to mention geographical, extremely well, as evidenced by this and previous works – Year Of Wonders, her first book, about the plague in England in 1666 was very fine. Brooks is an Aussie, now resident in The States, and researches her different periods, different cultures, extremely well, so that readers do feel satisfying and realistically transported to times and places not their own.

The springboard for this particular book, People of The Book, has a real identity in the book itself, and in its known provenance in terms of times, places, events, as far as can be yielded by academic research.

Sarajevo Haggadah page, Wiki Commons, copyright expired

The ‘Book’ of the title is a famous (in ancient and rare book circles) tome called The Sarajevo Haggadah. Apologies to the cognoscenti, but for the benefit of those (like me) who had never heard of this book, a Haggadah is a Jewish text read at the Passover festival. The Sarajevo Haggadah, which dates from the fourteenth century, and is a beautifully illustrated manuscript, using hand ground paints, including colour from gems and minerals – lapis lazuli, copper, gold leaf, and hand written on specially prepared parchment from animal skins. It has a known, surprising history from the last century, being rescued from destruction twice by Muslims – once during the Second World War, by an Islamic scholar, who rescued it from certain destruction as a Jewish text, hiding it in a mosque. Then again, during the Bosnian war in the 90’s, when Sarajevo was under firebombing siege, it was rescued and hidden in a bank vault for safe-keeping by a Muslim librarian.

However, the much travelling Haggadah, which is thought to originate in Spain, during a period when Jews, Christians and Muslims coexisted in peace, ‘the Convivencia’, can be traced along several journeys from the fourteenth century, mirroring the history of Jewry during various pogroms. The book had a home in Venice in the early seventeenth century, and surfaced  in Bosnia at the latter part of the nineteenth century, when Bosnia was part of the Austro-Hungarian empire. It got relocated to Vienna at this time.

Brooks tells the story of where the book was known to be at various times, and the writer’s imagination peoples the known history of the place and time, particularly around what is known about Jewish communities, and how Jews were allowed, or not, to be within the wider community of the time and place.

Map of the Sarajevo Haggadah’s journey – book endpapers

The historical sections, even though at some points she lectures rather on facts we need to know – how parchment was prepared, brushes and colours made, and who did these things, are in the main absolutely absorbing, and were the book merely presented unadorned as the history of the book, I would have loved it without reservation.

However what doesn’t work quite so well is the creation of a further story. The central person in the book is Hanna, an invented Australian rare book restorer, with her own troubled history – a difficult relationship with her neurosurgeon mother, the mystery of her own birth, and her trail past and present lovers. Even though Brooks is an Aussie, there is something almost too saltily overcharacterised in Hanna’s strine brashness, so she feels a little like an intelligent Aussie cipher with attitude, far less believable than the more distant inventions of the book within. Each time I came out of the past and into a Hanna section, my interest drifted, she seemed a bit of an authorial device, who had to be given credibility by her own back story, in order to achieve a particular narrative twist

The over arching story of the book, which almost acts as a real symbol of how humanity can transcend the divisions and enmities which the human race itself creates, is a testament to the importance of books, of knowledge and wisdom shared, of how much we can learn from other cultures from their book, and of the transcending power of books, their writers and their readers. And to the importance of a humanity prepared to accommodate each other in community. People, and their books, finding home.

As Brooks quotes, right at the start, from the nineteenth century German poet Heinrich Heine

There, where one burns books,
One in the end burns men

I was teased and steered towards this  from another blogger, Carrie Rubin, making a comment about it on  the inestimable Jilanne Hoffman’s blog. I went immediately a-buying. A good, immersive read, not to mention a ping ping in the direction of both Carrie’s and Jillane’s blogs

People Of The Book Amazon UK
People Of The Book Amazon USA