Year of Wonders by Geraldine Brooks

One of my favorite reads of 2008 was Geraldine Brooks' Pultizer Prize-winning novel, March, which portrayed the Civil War experiences of the absent patriarch of the March family from Louisa May Alcott's beloved Little Women. It was masterful work on two fronts. March was an example of the best kind of historical fiction, using thorough research and stellar writing to place a compelling story in an equally fascinating setting. It was also a brilliant revisionist work; many are the mediocre derivative works that seek to leech off a treasured masterpiece (Gregory Maguire has somehow made an entire literary career out of it). Not so with March, which adds a dark dimension to Alcott's classic while remaining true to the original narrative.

March was not Brooks' first novel (nor by the time I read it was it her most recent), so when I discovered that her debut novel was also a work of historical fiction, it seemed worth a browse. In Year of Wonders, Brooks tackled a rather more distant subject: an isolated English village which quarantines itself during the Great Plague of 1665-6. Based on the true story of the village of Eyam, Brooks frames her narrative through the memories of protagonist Anna Frith, a young widow who has survived the plague and continues her work as housekeeper of the local rectory despite the self-imposed seclusion of the rector:

At day's end, when I leave the rectory for home, I prefer to walk through the orchard on the hill rather than go by the road and risk meeting people. After all we've been through together, it's just not possible to pass with a polite, "Good night t'ye." And yet I haven't the strength for more. Sometimes, not often, the orchard can bring back better times to me. These memories of happiness are fleeting things, reflections in a stream, glimpsed all broken for a second and then swept away in the current of grief that is our life now.

The first flashback returns to the early months of Anna's widowhood, which preceded the plague. Indeed, her husband was killed not by disease, but by a collapse in the mine which he owned and worked, an occupation even more treacherous in the seventeenth-century than today. Left to fend for herself and her two young sons with greatly decreased economic means, Anna decides to take a boarder, George Viccars. A skilled tailor, Viccars has come to the village to make use of his trade, which he had most recently plied in several of England's larger towns. Before long, Viccars is a trusted member of the home, gaining the affection of Anna's sons and increasingly, Anna herself. But just as she begins to seriously entertain the possibility of a romantic relationship, tragedy strikes: Viccars falls deathly ill with the symptoms of bubonic plague:

I almost dropped the pitcher in my shock. The fair young face of the evening before was gone from the pallet in front of me. George Viccars lay with his head pushed to the side by a lump the size of a newborn piglet, a great, shiny, yellow-purple knob of pulsing flesh. His face, half turned away from me because of the excrescence, was flushed scarlet, or rather, blotched, with shapes like rings of rose petals blooming under his skin. His blond hair was a dark, wet mess upon his head, and his pillow was drenched with sweat. There was a sweet, pungent smell in the garret. A smell like rotting apples.

Despite Viccars' urgent request, with the rector's affirmation, that Anna burn his belongings after his death, many of his clients demand the return of the garments he was assembling for them. Thus goes out into the village the seeds of its own destruction. Unfortunately, some of the first blows strike too close to home:

I crooned to him as I climbed the stairs and laid him down upon our pallet. He lay just as I placed him, his arms splayed limply. I lay down beside him and drew him close. I pretended to myself that he would wake in the wee hours with his usual lusty cry for milk. For a time his little pulse beat fast, his tiny heart pounding. But toward midnight the rhythms became broken and weak and finally fluttered and faded away. I told him I loved him and would never forget him, and then I folded my body around my dead baby and wept until finally, for the last time, I fell asleep with him in my arms.

Understandably, these events put Anna into a shocked depression from which she could hardly have been blamed if she never recovered. Certainly these were deadly times, particularly for young children, as reflected in the advice of Anna's stepmother not to name or love a child before they could walk. Nevertheless, the trauma for a woman just eighteen years of age to lose her husband and then watch her two young sons deteriorate and die before her very eyes, in her own arms, must approach the limits of human capacity. Indeed, Anna seeks comfort in the local herbalist's hidden stash of opiate poppies. And yet slowly, Anna regains her humanity, with the help of the rector's wife, Elinor Mompellion, who reveals her own sorrows to Anna and joins her in an effort to understand the disease that is plaguing their village and seek any remedy or defense against it:

And so for the rest of that day, we pored through the books that Elinor had carried from the rectory, looking first for the names of plants said to be strengthening for any of the many body parts the Plague seemed to attack. It was tedious going, for the rectory's books were in Latin or Greek, which Elinor had to translate for me... When we had the names of the plants, we went through the herb bunches, trying, sometimes with great difficulty, to match the descriptions in the books with the drying leaves and roots before us.

If there is a flaw to Brooks' book, it is the underdevelopment of the characters other than Anna, and perhaps Elinor. Partly this is explicable by the novel's high mortality rate; most of the villagers die, either of plague, accident, or murder, before all that much can be said about them. But it does mildly blunt the impact of their fates, as well as the plausibility of some of the twists of the novel's plot. Characterization is one of the novelist's greatest challenges, however, so it is no great insult to suggest Brooks was still perfecting it in this first novel, particularly as I already know how well she does it in her sophomore effort.

Where Year of Wonders most splendidly forecasts the success of March is the shared beauty of Brooks' ability to evoke all aspects of her historical setting. If her characters are sometimes a bit flat, they never lack credibility as creatures of 17th-century England. Brooks faithfully renders the people and events of the novel in the times in which they lived, never stooping to portraying them as inferior or barbaric, from the villagers' fateful suspicion of the herbalist widow Mem Gowdie and her niece, to Anna and Elinor's quest to understand the basics of disease vectors:

There it was, our Plague-scoured village, the names of all its three hundred and three score sorry souls pinned to the map like insect specimens on a board. Under the names of near fifty, Elinor had drawn a black line. I had not conceived that the sickness already had undone so many. The map showed it clearly: the way the contagion had spread out from my cottage, a starburst of death.

Even the most barbaric acts in the novel are inspired by feelings of fear or desires for vengeance, which hardly separate those times from our own. Despite their superstitions and their scientific ignorance, these were fully-formed homo sapiens with the range of human emotions, and Brooks admirably presents them as such. It seems Brooks has a real knack for this historical fiction stuff, which she proved yet again in her third and most recent novel, People of the Book, which I will review on Friday.