What Book to Read?

This may not be a great novel, but I think it is a very good one.

The ‘book’ is the Hebrew codex known as the Sarajevo Haggadah. Brooks has taken the real life rescue of the Haggadah by a Muslim librarian from Serb shelling sometime during the siege of Sarajevo, 1992-1995, as the starting point for an imaginative exploration of how the book, created in her story in the 1490s (but probably even older) travelled from Spain to Venice then ultimately to Bosnia. The ‘people of the book’ are ‘the different hands that had made it, used it, protected it’.

The story starts in 1996 with Hanna, an Australian museum conservator, who is asked to ‘stabilize’ the rescued Haggadah so it can be displayed as a symbol of hope for the future in the shattered city. Hanna is technically good at her job. ‘But there is something else, too. It has to do with an intuition about the past. By linking research and imagination, sometimes I can think myself into the heads of the people who made the book.’ She finds tiny clues in the binding that give some indication of where it has been, and for each clue the narrative switches to an explanation of how and by whom this clue came to be left. Hanna’s exploration links the other stories, but she also has a story of her own which contains one last twist in the history of the book.

The history of the Haggadah’s journeys is filled with violence, intolerance and persecution. It is sobering to be reminded just how institutionalised anti-Semitism was in Europe throughout this period. Some of the Jews expelled from Spain in 1492 were accepted by the city of Venice, but were still restricted to living in the ‘Getto’, and forced to wear red caps as a sign that the blood of Christ was on their heads. The Nazi and Ustashe fanatics of WWII drew on a long history of persecution. The Roman Catholic Church, through the Inquisition, also played its part in the misery inflicted on the Jews. But there are also examples of generosity and bravery across cultures. Bosnian Muslims twice saved the Jewish book – in fact as well as in fiction – and there are other examples of love and kindness. That ‘diverse cultures influence and enrich one another’ is the real message of the novel.

The story is well crafted and highly readable. There is a sense in which the structure is contrived, in that the reader always learns far more than Hanna can possible find out through her investigation of the remaining fragments of the book’s history. But fiction is contrivance, to be admired when done skilfully, as it is here. I perhaps remain a bit unconvinced by elements of Hanna’s story: for example, did her mother have to be quite so terrible? But to describe it as one critic does as a ‘clichéd personal story’ is going a bit far.  And I can see why Brooks included the final twist which makes Hanna a participant in the long history of the Haggadah, not just an observer.

Brooks won a Pulitzer Prize for her novel March (2005) which speculates on the life of the absent father of Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women, away fighting in the American Civil War. She certainly can write. And her research for People of the Book (2008) seems meticulous. I was somewhat surprised therefore to read a suggestion that the story could be seen as some kind of up-market Da Vinci Code, only slower paced. Apart from both having religious themes, I can’t see that they have anything in common. This has a strong moral core entirely absent from Dan Brown’s work. If I were to make any comparison, it would be with the porcelain expert in Nicole Mones’s A Cup of Light, but I think this is a much better book – see my post on Mones’s.

One minor point intrigues me. The Sarajevo Haggadah is illuminated, which surprised art historians who had thought that Jews at that time shared the same prohibition as Muslims on using figurative art for religious purposes. As Hanna notes, the Sarajevo Haggadah changed this view. In Brooks’s story, its illustrated nature is almost accidental, not theological. Is she suggesting that art historians don’t really know what they are talking about?

You can read more about Geraldine Brooks here, and about the Sarajevo Haggadah here.