Helpful Score: 1
It's 1665: Plague Time in Not-So-Jolly Old England. We're in a remote village, a community so small that everyone knows a great deal about everyone else---their names and recent family trees, members of their current households (including servants), their business, health, religious practice, drinking habits, marital accord or discord, and a zillion other things. (This is perhaps more amazing to me than you, because I grew up in Houston.) In short, it's a cauldron of factoids and feelings in which information, no matter how trivial or intimate, travels fast, and emotions amplify faster. All these people are more or less devoutly religious and attend the same church. They seem to function well enough as a working community that they don't need much in the way of public officialdom: the Rector (minister of the church) is their de facto leader, when a leader is needed.
Why did I devote a whole paragraph to the village? Because only by imagining the setting can you get a sense of how powerfully put together, and also how richly entertaining, is this novel. I don't read a lot of historical novels, but it's certainly true of non-historical novels that it's unusual to find one that not only has gripping prose and great characters, but also such a "high concept" premise (as they say in the movie biz) that a tightly structured and satisfying storyline can be solidly built on the scaffolding of that premise. As for the sheer entertainment value---yes, it's partly Schadenfreude---all those guilty-pleasure gross-out descriptions of the most horriying ravages of the disease---but isn't that what you for look in a plague novel? (Among other things, of course.) And why not? I ask.
Contemporary pagans---and anyone who's interested in the conflict vs. mutual-tolerance situation between Christianity and pagan religions, through centuries of history and today as well---will find much to ponder in this story. The novel's heroine, Anna Frith, teaches herself ancient herbal remedies for alleviating pain and other symptoms, using resources from the mysterious hoard of a "witch" woman---who, despite her eccentricity, was accepted by the community, and even valued for her skills as a healer. But in the face of mounting hysteria over the death toll, that tolerance toward "witchy" dealings is strained. Dormant prejudice against "witches" is stirred back into life, and inflamed to the point of inciting mob violence. (I put the word "witch" in quotes---knowing full well that many witches use that word with pride---because it appears to have been a term of opprobrium, denoting a worshipper of the Devil, in the context of the bad guys in Brooks's novel.)
Now, I'm going to draw on your patience while I have fun with science. (-: My take on the village's situation, at the outset of the book, is this: when its people decide (heroically) to isolate themselves from the outside world, their community becomes a closed system---a system I'll assume is in some sort of equilibrium, stable or otherwise. But we don't get to observe this system in its normal equilibrium, because it's already in a process of responding to a perturbing element (plague bacillus) from outside. (The principles here are more or less from thermodynamics.) Now, a perturbed closed system like this can generate what are called emergent phenomena---tendencies, observables, events, which appear quite suddenly and are not predictable from even exhaustive information about the two combining elements (system + perturbance). But even with all of this going on, if the system has enough of what is called resilience, it will recover, organizing itself into a new and different equilibrium.
Following through on how this model might apply to Year of Wonders, we've got the closed system (village after they've isolated themselves), the perturbance (plague), and, I think, at least one emergent phenomenon: hysteria and fear over death and disease (predictable phenomena) leading to paranoia about those whom they call "witches," escalating to persecution and mob violence (an emergent, unpredictable, and destabilizing phenomenon). As for the resilience of the village system, what pulls it back toward recovery and restoring equilibrium (a new equilibrium)---we must look to our point-of-view character, the young widow Anna Frith, she of the "witchy" herbs and selfless amateur nursing, and the allies she recruits.
And so the process of recovery---in which the stabilizing and destabilizing elements in the system (village) intertwine, face off, push and pull, and are embodied in different characters---provides at least as much of the novel's suspense, as the possibility that if it kills enough people, the plague will wipe out the village. At the end of the novel, I was fascinated by the questions Brooks leaves hanging, such as how the new equilibrium of the village community will differ from the old one, and how that difference will shape the future of its people.
As I said, I don't usually read historical novels. Not because I know enough history to look down on them as insufficiently accurate or whatever, because I don't; but for the same reason that I've never studied history in any kind of systematic way: some of the particulars are intriguing, but the broad sweep of history just doesn't do much for me.
And so I appreciate this comment about Year of Wonders, from Publishers Weekly:
--Fiona Webster
My Bookshelf
(which has a bunch of yummy stuff,
but sorry, this book isn't there anymore)
Why did I devote a whole paragraph to the village? Because only by imagining the setting can you get a sense of how powerfully put together, and also how richly entertaining, is this novel. I don't read a lot of historical novels, but it's certainly true of non-historical novels that it's unusual to find one that not only has gripping prose and great characters, but also such a "high concept" premise (as they say in the movie biz) that a tightly structured and satisfying storyline can be solidly built on the scaffolding of that premise. As for the sheer entertainment value---yes, it's partly Schadenfreude---all those guilty-pleasure gross-out descriptions of the most horriying ravages of the disease---but isn't that what you for look in a plague novel? (Among other things, of course.) And why not? I ask.
Contemporary pagans---and anyone who's interested in the conflict vs. mutual-tolerance situation between Christianity and pagan religions, through centuries of history and today as well---will find much to ponder in this story. The novel's heroine, Anna Frith, teaches herself ancient herbal remedies for alleviating pain and other symptoms, using resources from the mysterious hoard of a "witch" woman---who, despite her eccentricity, was accepted by the community, and even valued for her skills as a healer. But in the face of mounting hysteria over the death toll, that tolerance toward "witchy" dealings is strained. Dormant prejudice against "witches" is stirred back into life, and inflamed to the point of inciting mob violence. (I put the word "witch" in quotes---knowing full well that many witches use that word with pride---because it appears to have been a term of opprobrium, denoting a worshipper of the Devil, in the context of the bad guys in Brooks's novel.)
Now, I'm going to draw on your patience while I have fun with science. (-: My take on the village's situation, at the outset of the book, is this: when its people decide (heroically) to isolate themselves from the outside world, their community becomes a closed system---a system I'll assume is in some sort of equilibrium, stable or otherwise. But we don't get to observe this system in its normal equilibrium, because it's already in a process of responding to a perturbing element (plague bacillus) from outside. (The principles here are more or less from thermodynamics.) Now, a perturbed closed system like this can generate what are called emergent phenomena---tendencies, observables, events, which appear quite suddenly and are not predictable from even exhaustive information about the two combining elements (system + perturbance). But even with all of this going on, if the system has enough of what is called resilience, it will recover, organizing itself into a new and different equilibrium.
Following through on how this model might apply to Year of Wonders, we've got the closed system (village after they've isolated themselves), the perturbance (plague), and, I think, at least one emergent phenomenon: hysteria and fear over death and disease (predictable phenomena) leading to paranoia about those whom they call "witches," escalating to persecution and mob violence (an emergent, unpredictable, and destabilizing phenomenon). As for the resilience of the village system, what pulls it back toward recovery and restoring equilibrium (a new equilibrium)---we must look to our point-of-view character, the young widow Anna Frith, she of the "witchy" herbs and selfless amateur nursing, and the allies she recruits.
And so the process of recovery---in which the stabilizing and destabilizing elements in the system (village) intertwine, face off, push and pull, and are embodied in different characters---provides at least as much of the novel's suspense, as the possibility that if it kills enough people, the plague will wipe out the village. At the end of the novel, I was fascinated by the questions Brooks leaves hanging, such as how the new equilibrium of the village community will differ from the old one, and how that difference will shape the future of its people.
As I said, I don't usually read historical novels. Not because I know enough history to look down on them as insufficiently accurate or whatever, because I don't; but for the same reason that I've never studied history in any kind of systematic way: some of the particulars are intriguing, but the broad sweep of history just doesn't do much for me.
And so I appreciate this comment about Year of Wonders, from Publishers Weekly:
- Discriminating readers who view the term historical novel with disdain will find that this debut by praised journalist Brooks (Foreign Correspondence) is to conventional work in the genre as a diamond is to a rhinestone.
--Fiona Webster
My Bookshelf
(which has a bunch of yummy stuff,
but sorry, this book isn't there anymore)
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