ADVERTISER BOOK CLUB
Fateful trip inspires book 'Year of Wonders'
• Author has ties to Islands
• Get involved in our book club
By Wanda A. Adams
Advertiser Books Editor
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Had it not been for her husband, Pulitzer Prize-winning writer Tony Horwitz, Brooks might not have discovered the threads of her first novel, the current selection of The Advertiser Book Club. And had it not been for the couple's decision to raise their son, Nathaniel, 6, in a rural Virginia town, she might never have gained a key insight that helped her to develop that idea.
"Year of Wonders" is the fictionalized story of a village that voluntarily quarantined itself rather than allow the bubonic plague to spread beyond its borders. It was named a Notable Book by both the New York Times and Washington Post and received excellent reviews. But the novel was released right before the Sept. 11 attacks and missed the arc of celebrity it might have otherwise reached.
"Year of Wonders" began one "absolutely gorgeous" June day in 1990. Brooks' husband was on assignment in England for the Wall Street Journal, and Brooks was on holiday from her reporting job with the same paper. He was doing a story in the Derbyshire countryside, and she decided to tag along and treat herself to a long walk.
As she rambled, she came upon a sign inscribed with just two words: "Plague Village."
"I've always been fascinated by the plague, and the history of medicine in general. To me, tales of disease were better than '1010 Nights,' " Brooks said, with the cheery half-laugh that punctuates much of her conversation. "Not many places in the world try and attract visitors by putting up a sign that says 'Plague Village,' but it worked for me."
In more ways than one. Not only did Brooks enjoy exploring the beautifully preserved town of Eyam (pronounced "Eeem"), she also got bitten by a bug (thankfully not a plague-spreading flea). "I didn't run home that day and quit my day job to start writing a novel in my garret, but there was something about the place that kept me returning to it in my imagination," Brooks said.
Indeed, the book came to fruition a while later, when Horwitz and Brooks moved to a town with about the same population as that of Eyam in 1666, the plague year — about 350 people. She began to think about what it would mean to her own community to lose almost three quarters of its residents.
"It became more vivid to me what a toll it must have taken," she said. "In a small place, your lives are much more bound up with each other. When a neighbor has an affair with another neighbor's husband, everybody is affected. ... How much more so in a small village in the 17th century, when villagers were much more reliant on each other. When the smith dies, there's no one else to shoe the horses."
Dredging up the past
In the summer of 1991, she returned to Eyam to spend time with the town historian and pore over documents on the plague and on everyday life in the 1600s. Though she collected some interesting anecdotes, and one particular tidbit that would give her her narrator, Brooks soon realized that "the historians are in massive disagreement over even the most basic details" about the plague of 1666.
"That's where the reporter gives way to the novelist and you try to imagine it," said Brooks. She imagined it through the eyes of Anna Frith, who came to her by means of just one line.
The words were those of the real-life pastor of Eyam, the Rev. William Mompesson, who — as Brooks' character Michael Mompellion does in the novel — used his pulpit to convince the villagers that, rather than running from the place when plague was reported, they should stay put, brokering a deal with a nearby landowner to supply food and other goods to the village boundaries while they waited out the plague's ravages.
This act is debated in Eyam, and elsewhere, to this day. Was he a selfless saint or a mistaken visionary who condemned the majority of his congregation to their deaths?
"How do you bring people to consensus on such a life-threatening act of sacrifice? And if you have done that, how do you live with it, what survives?
"How could faith survive when you think you're doing what God wants you to do, and yet the deaths continue and continue? What do you think of God then?" Brooks asked, reeling off the questions her book seeks to explore.
In real life, Mompesson was forced to leave the village and was regarded with suspicion ever after.
Brooks' attention was captured by a line among the few surviving from the hand of Mompesson, who wrote, after the death of his wife from the plague, "My maid continued in health; which was a blessing, for had she quailed, I should have been ill set ..."
"As soon as I saw that, I knew that she was the voice of the novel," Brooks said. "I tried to find out if anything more was known of the real maid and nothing was, of course, because nobody bothered to document the lives of domestic servants."
'A license to be curious'
From these few delicate bones, Brooks fashioned Anna, a widow struggling to raise her two children after the death of her husband in the mines. She takes in a lodger, an itinerant tailor, and with him, the plague.
Anna is entirely believable and wholly memorable, a woman who perseveres through hardship as unrelenting, Brooks writes, as a lash that falls again and again in the same place.
"The hardest thing about finishing the book was knowing I wouldn't be able to spend every day with her anymore," Brooks said. "I drew a lot on women I'd met in the Middle East, women who had been brought up in a very circumscribed domestic world and encouraged to think it would always be that way, but who had to emerge because the men were dead or gone to war."
Geraldine Brooks is herself a woman who came out of a circumscribed life — not her actual surroundings in the suburbs of Sydney, Australia, but a reticence that didn't bode well for her nearly lifelong ambition to become a reporter. She had fallen in love with journalism at age 8, when her father, a semi-retired entertainer, got a job as a proofreader at a Sydney newspaper. She well recalls her visit to her father's workplace — the shadowy pressroom, misted with ink, and the feel of a newspaper literally hot off the presses, warm and smudgy in her hand. "The whole thing was so exciting that I knew wanted to be part of that," she said.
Brooks went doggedly at it until she was hired as a cub reporter. She made a name for herself as a foreign correspondent for the Wall Street Journal, and with two non-fiction books: "Nine Parts of Desire: The Hidden World of Islamic Women" (1995) and "Foreign Correspondence" (1998), a memoir of her Australian girlhood and childhood pen pals.
She says she never lost her love for journalism, though, as a mom, she appreciates the freedom that writing fiction from home has given her.
"Journalism is a license to be curious, offensively curious," she says, laughing again. "You can call up anybody. I'm basically a pretty shy person, yet when I had a notebook out, I didn't have to be shy; it wasn't really me, it was the paper."
Yearning to see the wide world beyond the provincial Sydney of her day, she got a job overseas and eventually found herself covering big wars and small in Africa, Asia and the Middle East. She learned a lot about character and how people behave in crisis, lessons that would later go into "Year of Wonders."
"I used to get incredibly swept up in the lives of the people I covered," said Brooks. "I do think there is a gender difference in people who are drawn to these kinds of assignments. I was always much more interested in the civilians and the impact on them whereas a lot of the guys just really want to get to the front lines and describe the fighting. Covering war, you are never so aware of being alive at those times. It made me appreciate my normal life so much."
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Here's how to get involved in The Honolulu Advertiser Book Club:
- Membership: There is no formal membership. Just read the book and participate in the virtual discussion by sending in your comments and questions.
- Our book: "Year of Wonders: A Novel of the Plague" by Geraldine Brooks; Penguin, $14
- Reading period: Through Nov. 1
- Next "discussion": Nov. 10
- To participate in the discussion: Write Wanda Adams, Books Editor, The Advertiser, P.O. Box 3110, Honolulu, HI 96802. Fax: 525-8055. E-mail: bookclub@honoluluadvertiser.com
- Listen: To the "Sandwich Islands Literary Circle" at 9:30 tonight, KHPR 88.1 FM, KKUA 90.7 FM Maui, KANO 91.1 FM Hilo; or hear the program online, starting tomorrow at the URL below.
- If you have trouble finding the book: Please call Wanda Adams, 535-2412. We want to keep tabs on supply.
- To experience the book club online: Visit http://the.honoluluadvertiser.com/current/il/bookclub.
