Book burnings. Always the forerunners. Heralds of the stake, the ovens, the mass graves.
So much about People of the Book was just smart: Geraldine Brooks took a semi-famous historical object with an honest-to-goodness fascinating story -- the Sarajevo Haggadah -- and used it to explore the history of a people -- in this case, 500 years of European Jewish life. Written in an alternating jump between past and present, People of the Book starts with the story of Hannah Heath, a rare book conservationist who is called in to work on the recently discovered haggadah (thought destroyed in the Bosnian War). During her painstaking labours, Hannah recovers clues from the book itself as to its long history: a piece of an insect wing; a crystal of salt; a sample of a wine stain; grooves that suggest missing silver clasps; and a single white hair. As she tracks down experts who can shed light on each of these clues, there's a CSI-like glimpse into what contemporary book conservation might be like. But of more interest to me were the jumps back in time -- for example, the insect wing is identified as belonging to a butterfly that lives only in the Alps and the next section, set at the brink of WWII, describes how the book wound up there; and while the section is ostensibly about the book itself, it's also a picture of Jewish life from the very beginning of Hitler's rise to power. This structure felt very clever and the historical bits were obviously well researched, but overall, there was a lack of the literary in this book; a lack of art in pulling it all together.
In particular, the contemporary parts were unnecessarily melodramatic with Hannah's star-crossed love affair and her terrible relationship with her terrible mother. I was eventually put completely off when a character said the following to Hannah:
The book has survived the same human disaster over and over again. Think about it. You've got a society where people tolerate difference, like Spain in the Convivencia, and everything's humming along: creative, prosperous. Then somehow this fear, this hate, this need to demonize 'the other'--it just sort of rears up and smashes the whole society. Inquisition, Nazis, extremist Serb nationalists...same old, same old.At that point I realised that Brooks didn't trust me as the reader to understand what she was trying to say and I'm not likely to learn something from someone who treats me like I'm dumb (and, hey, doesn't Hannah say something like that in this book? Brooks should know better.)
People of the Book isn't terrible -- the history was detailed even if the historical characters were a bit underdeveloped -- and the audio version that I listened to was very well done (I was particularly fascinated by the voices done by Edwina Wren: Not only was there a huge difference between Hannah's middle class Australian accent and her mother's upper-crust one, but she equally pulled off the Scottish Sikh police officer, the Albanian Muslim teenager, the Venetian Rabbi, and the Catalonian Emir among many others). If I had to place People of the Book on a scale with similar historical fiction that I've read, it's way above The Da Vinci Code and way below The Name of the Rose, probably rubbing shoulders with The Pillars of the Earth and Wolf Hall.
