In The Secret Chord, Geraldine Brooks expands what little is known of the Old Testament biblical hero, King David, through the first-person lens of his seer, Natan. From vacation Bible School, I was familiar with the story of the young David using a sling to kill the giant, Goliath. Brooks’s use of character and place-names in the Hebrew transliteration, rather than the usual spellings, helped me distance the Biblical story from her work and let me read it more judiciously and objectively.
Natan, on David’s orders, interviews the king’s wives and others which Natan then combines with his own observations to write a biography. Thus the reader gets multiple perspectives on the life of a very complex, ambitious, yet wholly human man: at times a loving father and friend; at others, a warrior capable of brutal, inhumane acts, a man ruled by lust; at still others, a superb musician, composer, and poet. We also learn Natan’s story who, as a boy, witnesses his father’s death at the hands of David.
Though many of the details have come purely from Brooks’s imagination, they work together with what is historically known to flesh out the story of King David.
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The Secret Chord (Penguin Books, October 6, 2015) is available through:
Your local independent bookseller | Amazon | Barnes & Noble
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You can read my review of Geraldine Brooks’s Horse here.
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