Year of Wonders
Geraldine Brooks
Penguin Books
2001
Ms. Hen read this because it was recommended to her online.
She had read one other novel by Ms. Brooks, MARCH, which won the Pulitzer Prize
that year, and she loved it. Many years ago, she interviewed Geraldine Brooks
for her college newspaper, and met her at a reading. Ms. Hen thinks that YEAR
OF WONDERS is a book everyone should read right now because it is important to
the way we are living our lives in this moment.
YEAR OF WONDERS is a novel about a village in England that
is struck by the plague and almost everyone who lives there dies. A man comes
to the village who works as a tailor, and he stays with Anna Frith, a young
window with two children who works as a servant for the rector and his
wife. He spends time in the village, but is suddenly struck dead with the
plague. The villagers start to die, first they get a fever, then they get a
boil on some part of their body, and right before they die, they get a rash.
Anna helps the rector’s wife take care of the ailing villagers by learning
about the herbs that the midwives used to heal people.
The rector implores everyone to stay in the village so the
plague will not spread. The large landowning family decides to leave because
they do not want to get sick, and the rector doesn’t like that they leave, but
he can’t stop them. In some families, almost everyone dies. Anna’s father
becomes a gravedigger and takes people’s precious belongings to make profit
from the dead. The rector decides to have their Sunday services outside so they
will not be so close to each other in the church.
This novel spoke to Ms. Hen about what is happening right now. This is not the first time there has been a pandemic, but the
difference between 1660 and now is enormous. The people in this time had very
little communication with the outside, and barely knew what was happening in
other parts of England, let alone the world. Also, there was no medicine or
science. The rector had told them before the Plague came around that if a
person was sick, it was because God was testing them, and they should not try
to get better. The rector gives a sermon and tells the villagers that they
should be grateful that God is giving them a gift because He loves them so
much. There is no school in the area and almost nobody can read, so they do not
have the education and capacity to question what the rector says.
Though they have little science, and don’t know how to stop
the Plague, what Ms. Hen noticed, is that they have a sense of community. The
people help each other for the most part, though their loved ones die, and they
are destitute. Ms. Hen doesn’t see people helping others that much when it
isn’t necessary in these times. We have science, but the expression, “You do
you,” has become popular during this pandemic. Ms. Hen believes in this,
because she knows she can’t get angry at the world, but at the same time, she
thinks it’s selfish.
Another aspect of this novel that Ms. Hen admires is the
writing style. The book is well researched and the expressions and the
dialogue seem authentic. Ms. Hen didn’t know what every word meant, but she could
figure them out by context. This is like reading a book that was actually
written during that time. Except in that time, a novel would not have such
strong women characters.
Ms. Hen liked the ending; it is not mushy and romantic,
because that’s not the way life is. Ms. Hen thinks that everyone should read
this novel to learn the way people used to be compared to the way we are now,
and how much the world has changed, and how much it hasn’t. How far have we
come in almost four hundred years? We’re being struck again, and history
repeats itself if we don’t study the past. Even if we do, it still comes back.
No comments:
Post a Comment