geraldine brooks the secret chord review

They grow organic vegetables and have two dogs, Milo, an Australian kelpie, and Simba, a Sydney silky pomeranian cross that belonged to Brooks' mother, as well as a horse, Valentine, and three alpacas called Heathcliff, Monty and Alec Guinness. She lives in a 17th-century millhouse on 2.5 hectares on Martha's Vineyard, an island off Massachusetts, with Horwitz and their two sons, the youngest of whom, Bizuayehu, they adopted seven years ago in Ethiopia when he was five. 'I loved that it starts with the line that 'Mikhal loved David', because women had little agency in these stories.'īrooks, who turned 60 in September, is a petite woman with an infectious laugh. The portrait of the arc of the marriage between David and Mikhal is one of Brooks' favourite parts of the story, because the emotions are so recognisable. 'He asked me to do things in the dark that recalled my brother to him,' Mikhal says in the novel. Mikhal tells Natan that it's always the man whose love is thought worthy of recording in history, and she also reveals how David loved her brother, Yonatan (Jonathan). The Bible struck Brooks as a 'blokey thing' in which females are lucky even to be named, and she has Mikhal ask of women, 'Which of them has ever been mistress of her own destiny?' Instead, David's long-time adviser and sometime critic Natan conspires with Batsheva to thwart the plot and get David to name her son, Solomon, king instead. 'As David lies dying at the end of his long life, David's eldest surviving son is trying to steal the throne out from under him. 'It's a brilliant scene, rich with tension and suspense. 'The reading that woke me up to the fact that there was much more to David's story than I knew was the haftarah dealing with the death-bed power-plays engineered by Natan,' she says.

'David had crossed my horizon many times, either in those execrable movies like that Richard Gere debacle or in the cliches – you know, a day doesn't go by when there hasn't been a David and Goliath battle,' says Brooks, a former Catholic who converted to Judaism in 1984 after marrying the American author Tony Horwitz.ĭuring the bar mitzvah, Brooks picked up a Jewish text, the Humash, and began reading the David story.

Brooks owes the inspiration for the book and the title to Nathaniel and dedicates the novel to him.

Nathaniel had taken up the harp and played a beautiful arrangement of the Leonard Cohen song Hallelujah.

Geraldine brooks the secret chord review