Keeping the faith

People of several religions helped preserve an ancient Hebrew text in its perilous odyssey across Europe

January 13, 2008|Carrie Brown

People of the Book
By Geraldine Brooks
Viking, 372 pp., $25.95

Few fiction writers travel across territory as vast as that staked out by the intrepid Geraldine Brooks over the course of her career, namely, practically the whole world and several centuries of human civilization.

The author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel "March," which imagines the life of the famously absent father in Louisa May Alcott's "Little Women," Brooks began her writing career as a journalist for the Sydney Morning Herald and went on to cover some of the world's most incendiary political landscapes in the Middle East, Bosnia, Gaza, and Somalia for The Wall Street Journal. Her books of journalism, "Nine Parts of Desire: The Hidden World of Islamic Women" and "Foreign Correspondence: A Pen Pal's Journey From Down Under to All Over," are animated by Brooks's lucid take on the world, which is at once wide-eyed and clear-eyed. She meets fools and hypocrites with a dogged, even cheerful reasonableness that is as withering as invective. Yet one never senses a cynic in her work. There's a romance between Brooks and the world, and her writing is as full of heart and curiosity as it is intelligence and judgment.

Brooks followed "Year of Wonders," a novel based on the true story of an English village that quarantined itself during an outbreak of the bubonic plague in 1666, with "March," with its spellbinding evocation of the Civil War. Clearly, one historical period with its daunting requirements for authenticity is not enough for Brooks, whose research skills and imagination obviously require more than one era and one continent to be satisfied. Her new novel, "People of the Book," roves across time from the 15th century to the present, and across the globe from Rome to Sarajevo, Venice to Vienna, Boston to Barcelona, as it follows the story of a real book, a famous Hebrew codex known as the Sarajevo Haggadah, a rare illuminated manuscript.