Review: People of the Book

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POSTED: 16 JAN 09

Geraldine Brooks, People of the Book

(Fourth Estate; 400pp paperback; $32.99)

If you have ever worried about your parent/child relationship, you should read Geraldine Brooks’ new novel, People of the Book, and feel reassured.

The mother/daughter story is by no means a central theme of the book, but it lingers. The selfishness and hostility is overwhelming, and the effect on the main character, Hanna Heath, and her approach to adult life is profound.

Brooks places her young Australian heroine, an expert conservationist of medieval manuscripts, in Sarajevo in 1995 — in the first days after the brutal Bosnian Civil War.

Hanna has been called in to authenticate and preserve the Sarajevo Haggadah, a treasure miraculously saved in 1992 during intense bombing, by Ozren Karaman, head of the city’s museum library.

The Haggadah is a lavishly illuminated Hebrew manuscript created in medieval Spain, which, because of its illustrations (made at a time when Jewish belief had been firmly against graven images or likenesses of any kind), had turned religious art history on its head when it was ‘discovered’ in Sarajevo in 1894.

Hanna is the kind of professional who is expert at both the technical aspects — the science and fine craft that the preservation work needs – and the history.

She has an intuitive ability that links her authentic research work with her imagination — so she can ‘get into the heads’ of the people who made, owned or possessed the Haggadah over the ages.

A tale is unfolded through different lands and different times ... following the trail of the extraordinary relic and providing plausible explanations for its survival and breaks with tradition.

The story of the manuscript is convincing, enlightening and fascinating.

In between the professional work and the history, we follow Hanna’s personal story — a love affair, her professional challenges, her family identity, and that mother!

It all combines to make a more than enjoyable reading experience.

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