Year of Wonders: A Novel of the Plague
This is the novel by Geraldine Brooks I finished two weeks ago, swooning. I was so thrilled to be transported, so happy to have found a small but significant novel to rest my mind inside, even if the resting did take place in a village being slowly demolished by a 17th century plague in a Derbyshire village. It was a good remedy from the brontosorus of
Freedom by Jonathan Franzen- a novel I dove into fully expecting to if not love, deeply like, as I had his
Corrections. Freedom left me cold. I couldn't care. The essential and inexplicable ingredient for novelistic passion. The writing was good. The characters detailed. The settings precise. The plot went somewhere. But I didn't care where it went, or about the people it happened to.
Year of Wonders begins with the protagonist Anna Frith, widowed at 18 years with two tiny sons she loves entirely. Her love for these boys is detailed beautifully, so beautifully. The way a mother's eye sees her children when they are small is a passionate, sensual and ferocious thing, and the descriptions of Anna nursing her littlest boy alongside the river brought tears to my eyes. I felt the bonds of human life as they extend backward farther than the eye can see, but not beyond the novelist imagination. Mrs. Brooks uses fine historical details to layer and layer and layer each plot turn, and I felt myself enveloped in her mastery. Mrs. Brooks based this novel on the true story of a village infected with Plague that decided, with the leadership of their preacher, to quarantine themselves until the dying had stopped. In this dark nightmare of a bubble, the story takes place. Anna befriends the preacher and his selfless but bracingly practical wife after the inevitable worst happens: her two sons both die. I found myself late at night, covers pulled to my chin as I cried and read the description of Anna's little boy's slow dying. I was transported to Ever's hospitalization with RSV when Mrs. Brooks described the little boys grey pallor, his struggle to breathe, and what makes my stomach turn and my eyes fill to even recount- his acquiescence of his nursies. When Ever gave up on nursing, I felt the beginnings, the fringes, of despair. Reading this reminded me of what Mr. Curry and I had remarked to each other more than once- thank God we live here and now, where our baby could be saved. And oh God, to think of all the mothers.... To walk alongside a narration of a mother who could do absolutely nothing as her son fought to breathe and then slowly slipped away, dying in her arms, was not an experience I'd seek again. But it is truly great writing.
The story unfolds with incredible precision and pacing. The only place lacking in a perfect human heartbeat was in Anna's mourning of her son's. In the novel Anna takes on the work of the dying and as a midwife to women birthing amongst this tragedy, and surely any woman in that position would have grief deferred. Still, I think the muck black river of her grief was not accounted for enough.
Highly Recommended.
