YEAR OF WONDERS, Geraldine Brooks

February 2003, chosen by F

Points: 6.25

Blurb says: 

"Spring 1666: when the Great Plague reaches the quiet Derbyshire village of Eyam, the villagers make an extraordinary decision.  They elect to isolate themselves in a fateful quarantine.  So begins the Year of Wonders, seen through eighteen year old Anna Frith's eyes as she confronts the loss of her family, the disintegration of the community and the lure of a dangerous and illicit love.  Based on a true story, this novel explores love and learning, fear and fanaticism, and the struggles of seventeenth century science and religion to interpret the world at the cusp of the modern era."

They say:

"Geraldine Brooks's impressive first novel leaves us with the memory of
vivid characters struggling in timeless human ways with the hardships
confronting them"

"Year of Wonders carries absolute conviction as a evocation of place and
mood. It has a vivid imaginative truth and is beautifully written"

"More than a mountain of corpses, more than a sensual evocation of the
Sapphic bond between two women, more than a pulse-quickening tale of
misplaced sadomasochistic zeal, 'Years of Wonders' is a staggering fictional
debut"

We say:

Our new member looked a little startled as, wine-fuelled and chat-sated we set about discussing this book with our usual vigour.  It was worth taking a moment out to enlighten her, to explain that you cannot come innocent to a bookgroup book.  It is impossible to read it as if you want to read it, you have to turn the pages looking for trouble.  I don't know why that is so, it just is.  Perhaps because things you merely like aren't worth talking about, "Like it?" "Yeah, you?" "Yeah.  More wine?"

So, we found plenty wrong.  There was an apple and a whisket, a boil and a babe too far.  Personally I struggled to make the sense of the structure:  the book's opening chapter comes after the plague has been and gone, and seems to serve no further purpose other than to reveal that the Vicar's wife, Eleanor Monpellion, has died.  With a single sweep, the tension is gone:  sure, we are going to sense that one of the main 3 characters might die, but to tell us in advance?  Others forgave this for reasons that our moratorium on giving away the end forbids me to reveal!

Having said this, it is an easy enough book to read, and impressive as a first novel.  It evokes the time and place nicely, there is some good characterisation - the devious and self-serving Katherine Bradshaw and Anna's sui generis stepmother are particularly well-fleshed out.  Inevitably it is heavy on death although robust methods of dealing with grief mean that these are not generally dwelled on;  after all, there's always someone else about to croak their gruesome last and in need of a healing poultice.  Anna's grief for her babies, apart from a heartwrending sentence when she realises that the desperate keening she hears is her own, was fairly short-lived and she seems happy to transfer her affections to the Monpellions.

Yet the more we talked about it, the more impressive the level of research undertaken seeped out, with instances of witchcraft, religious takes - fatalism against puritanism for instance, herbalism, paganism, all of which make good set pieces and were fascinating in themselves as well as generating a good discussion for us.  

Overall, however, there remained something manufactured about it, a strong, and inevitable, sense of the modern perspective visited upon a very different time yet presented as being contemporaneous.  The narrative was too plodding, linear and episodic and sat oddly between the strange opening and the bizarre ending, neither of which bear convincing relation to the meat of the book.  It might almost have been better being non-fiction as the subject material was clearly fascinating, but is certainly worth a read - as long as you're not looking for trouble.