Brooks has the good taste not to attempt such violence towards her source material. A “reimagining” of the Israelites as nonreligious or of their prophets as fraudulent is lazy, but would certainly resolve the issue. For novelists, God has a tendency to steal the show, and the most obvious solution is to excise God entirely from the story. A novel should ideally allow for the role of choice in its protagonists’ lives, and a major character who is both omnipotent and omniscient calls the importance of such choices into question. He thus presents quite a challenge to the novel writer. References to the Judeo-Christian God are intertwined with every source for the life of David. On every page, Brooks’s writing around the potentially difficult historical details is so strong that her essential narrative and imagery are not swallowed up by their context.īrooks also solves another problem of genre: how to make the leap from religious text to novel. Consider this sentence: “I liked to walk in the garden at that still hour, listening to the low buzz of the bees, enjoying the sharp scent of the dry, fallen cedar needles and the wild zatar that fingered its way between the cracks of the paving stones.” Even without knowing that “zatar” refers to a Middle Eastern herb commonly used in Biblical times but now generally simulated in cooking with cheaper spice blends, the vividity of the image is undiminished.

Transliterations aside, Brooks’s presentation of historical material is spectacularly accessible. “The Secret Chord” picks up steam, however, to become an excellent novel that elegantly handles its historical context. This implied request to treat the book with the seriousness owed to a work backed by research distracts in the beginning from its literary qualities. From her preliminary declaration that she uses Tanakh transliterations like “Shaul, Shmuel and Shlomo, for example, rather than the perhaps more familiar Saul, Samuel, and Solomon” onward, an unstylish anxiety prevails. And so, in the midst of otherwise beautifully crafted prose, in which historical facts and details are melded seamlessly into a vivid, compelling narrative, Brooks inserts transliterations from Hebrew. Brooks appears determined to disprove an assumption that good history and a good novel cannot meet in a single book. But it initially raises concerns with its awkward beginning.

Pulitzer Prize winner Geraldine Brooks’s “The Secret Chord” bills itself as a bloodstained reimagining of the life of King David.

The secret chord review