People of the Book
March 16th 2008 23:03
People of the Book introduces us to Hanna Heath (Brooks’ first Australian heroine), a book conservator hired to work on an ancient Jewish codex for the Sarajevo Museum. But as it turns out, Heath is not just a conserver of manuscripts, a repairer armed with glues and brushes. She is an historian and forensic investigator, meticulously combing through and extracting the many minuscule particles of evidence that gathers between the pages over the centuries, determined to unearth the ‘people of the book’.
“ … a book is more than the sum of its materials. It is an artifact of the human mind and hand. The gold beaters, the stone grinders, the scribes, the binders, those are the people I feel most comfortable with. Sometimes in the quiet, these people speak to me.”
So, along with Hanna we discover the secrets of the Sarajevo Haggadah, a Jewish prayer book that was saved from Nazi destruction in 1941 by Muslim hands. But its history goes much further back and we, as readers, become privy to the book’s creation and precarious existence through a Europe which would both embrace and reject Jewish communities at the whim of rulers and fanatical views, while Hanna can only make assumptions from the small fragments she finds during her conservation.
As a lover of second hand books this novel pushes all my buttons. The history an old book carries can set my imagination soaring, and I was utterly caught up in the world of the Haggadah, its creators, owners and enemies. As with people, books with a past are much more interesting.
I’ll admit that after the first chapter I was thinking .. ooh, oh …
Da Vinci Code, but Brooks proved to be classer than that. This latest addition to her writing career delivers an historical novel that, again, is well researched and highly readable, much as her previous titles, Year of Wonders and March, which earned her the Pulitzer Prize. I can’t say I get much satisfaction from Brooks’ characters, they tend to be one dimensional and predictable, but I do like her gift for putting together a good yarn from historical fact. Her stories have the strength to carry themselves to a conclusion that can be a little opened ended but never the less satisfying.
So if you are a Geraldine Brooks fan, you won’t be disappointed with this one, and if you are yet to read her, People of the Book is as good a place to start than anywhere. Enjoy.
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