This month reader review is the novel Year of Wonder by Geraldine Brooks. The Famous Australian-American journalist and author whose 2005 novel, March, won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.
Geraldine Brooks is an Australian-American journalist and
author whose 2005 novel, March, won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.
The story is about the plague of 1666. The Black Death that
swept Continental Europe and England
in the fourteenth century was not the only appearance in history. The outbreak
in 1666 devastated the mountain village
of Eyam , northwest of London . Geraldine Brooks
uses this real-life event as the catalyst for Year of Wonders: A Novel of the
Plague. This historical novel may remind readers of Albert Camus’ The Plague,
but also of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter.
The plague enters the central England village, by way of a traveling
tailor whose cloth holds the deadly disease. Our heroine Anna Firth, a eighteen
year old widow with two children and a troubled childhood, opened her door to this
boarder. A budding relations start, but
soon the tailor becomes ill. He realizes that he has brought the plague after making
beautiful dress for the woman. Before he dies, he instructs Anna to destroy the
beautiful dress he made. Anna does, but the woman of the village refused. Anna is the servant and friend of Elinor
Mompellion and her husband Michael, the rector. As the plague spreads in the
village, they try to rally their neighbors to deal with the tragedy by praying
to God and taking practical precautions such as burning infected clothing and
supplies and closing themselves off from the world so they couldn't infect the
surround villages.
Unfortunately, their efforts meet with mixed success. Many people
tried to escape and met with outsiders that refused to let the leave. Still, others
in the village are prone to believing that a devil’s curse is upon them, killed.
Some turn to the occult for answers while others simply succumb to the ravages
of the disease. The Mompellions and Anna, first seen as pillars of strength,
are soon objects of defamation and hatred. Then, as mysteriously as it appears,
the plague runs its course, but not before it decimates the population and
forever changes the lives of the principal protagonist Anna.
Year of Wonders could have easily been a modern feminist
tale. Geraldine Brooks has depicted Anna as a strong woman who demonstrates
repeatedly that she can make her way in the world without men. The ending was to me unbelievable, yet it didn't seem forced. This novel is filled with moments of
compassion and sadness, as Anna comes to terms with the lingering presence of
the dead. Yet in the background Brooks paints the beauty of the English
countryside. Year of Wonders is a long fiction book, but one that any serious
read would enjoy.
Up next....
Walter Mosley short stories. Merge/Discipline
Up next....
Walter Mosley short stories. Merge/Discipline
