Book Report: A Year of Wonders

After randomly picking up Heliopolis, I put library holds on books by each of the remaining featured Iceland Writers Retreat authors. Then I wandered over to the fiction section of the Ballard branch to browse the shelves, and there was Geraldine Brooks’ Year of Wonders.

Initial Challenge

At first it was slow going. The novel is set in 1666, and Brooks’ first-person narrator, Anna, uses a lot of archaic words. I wondered at her use of “ye,” which I thought was pronounced “thee,” but other words, such as “sennight” were easier to swallow and effectively evoked the period without going overboard.

I am irritated when historical characters perceive events the same way the reader would, so the unusual number of progressive, modern minds populating the book’s tiny, northern English village gave me pause in the beginning. Any modern feminist could easily identify with Anna, despite her station as a rural domestic in the 17^th century. Rector Mompellion’s ministry more closely resembles a 20^th century Unitarian than “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God.” The only difference between herbalist/midwife Anys Gowdie and my college Wiccan friends is the depth of Anys’ herblore.

{2018 update: I have since heard Brooks address this criticism in workshops and at talks. She uses original documents, like court records in her research. And she says that in those documents, even though the language they had to express themselves with is different, the women who ran up against authority were as aware of patriarchal injustice as we are today.}

Challenge Resolved

But in the book, Anna’s attitudes are revealed to be the result of a keen mind put under tremendous pressure by circumstances that broke down societal structures that “kept her in her place.” Mompellion’s dark side is eventually revealed to be as medieval as the barber-surgeon’s techniques. (In my late-night headlong rush to finish the book, I might have missed something in Mompellion’s big reveal. It seemed quite sudden, the little bit of foreshadowing didn’t seem sufficient for such a big facet of character, and it was hard to reconcile with other aspects of his character, including his behavior post-reveal.) Anys’ fate confirms her outlier status.

Related Literature

A Year of Wonders shares many characteristics with The Red Tent. Both are firmly feminist stories where women of intelligence avoid the chains of traditional roles through medicine. But Year of Wonders was a much more enjoyable read. The endless childbirth stories in Red Tent are tiresome; the endless deaths in Year of Wonders are wearying in the way that the weight of grief is wearying. The deaths create an atmosphere that causes people to abandon societal guidelines and act on their own highest or basest impulses according to their character.

The relationships in Year of Wonder are more complex, too. Anna’s friendship with the rector’s wife conforms to the feminist “bond between women” trope, but her budding friendship with Anys fails completely; Anna and her stepmother are so dysfunctional they nearly destroy what is left of the village. Without whitewashing power dynamics or ignoring high rates of domestic abuse at all levels of village society, Brooks avoids the adversarial framework of relations between the sexes. The rector repeatedly provides the women in his life with material, intellectual, and spiritual support (dark side episodes excepted). Anna’s husband and her lodger both deal with her on a respectful and even footing.

Plague History

I’ve mostly read about the earlier Plague of the 14^th century, so A Year of Wonders constantly challenged my sense of history. I kept having to look up what century things happened in. I was also intrigued by the contrast (and I hope it’s not too much of a spoiler to say that Anna leaves England at the end) between an Englishwoman’s restrictions at home and her freedoms in Persia. Although she indicates those freedoms are due to her special status as an educated outsider, that role wouldn’t have done her any good in England.

Brooks knows what oppressed women are capable of . Before writing this novel she was a reporter in the Middle East. She covered turmoil and cultural dissolution that matched the scale of Plague and Reconstruction.

Unexpected Resolution

I love that Brooks tacked such a wildly unlikely adventure on to end of a story about surviving prolonged suffering. It reinforces the idea that the most hopeless situations can lead to brighter days. It is also an unexpected reversal of traditional storytelling. (I hope it’s not too much of a spoiler to say that Anna leaves England after the Plague.) I expect a novel to begin with the unlikely departure of a domestic servant on a ship bound for Persia. The book would be about her transformation in a foreign land. Instead, Brooks’ spends an entire novel tempering the steel of her character. The bleak hardship in her native home enables her to undertake previously unimaginable adventures later. It’s almost a matter of course at the end of such suffering.

Depth of Character

Brooks’ gives her characters, even the minor ones, more three-dimensionality than most of us credit the people we meet in real life. Like Anna, the reader marvels at the depths of courage, fear, hatred, generosity, and strength evidenced by normal people. The extremes of goodness and cruelty often appear in the same character. It is, as the New Yorker says, an “engagement with how people are changed by catastrophe.” It also explores how catastrophe peels layers off of ordinary folks, revealing latent complexity. Brooks repeatedly introduces us to immediately engaging characters, even as she Ensign Johnsons them pages later.

The Journey

Once I got past my initial difficulties, A Year of Wonders was completely absorbing. When a round of colds broke out at home, I passed my days in quiet dread of the inevitable fact that we would soon all be dead. The feeling only revealed itself to be inane when the full light of conscious thought was focused on it. It returned to lurk in the shadows of my mind whenever my attention was elsewhere.

Even after I finished the book, if I let my mind wander, it landed in a Plague-ridden English village. I tried to solve Anna’s problems in my dreams at night. It took a couple of days to completely return to the real world and recover from a sort of narrational jet-lag. I guess fiction really can take you on a journey.