Geraldine Brooks
Year of Wonders: A Novel of the Plague
Fourth Estate, $27.95pb, 308pp, 1 84115 661 2

ONE OF THE most moving narratives to emerge from the recent traumas in New York was that of the office workers slowly descending the stairwells of the World Trade Centre, seeing the firemen rushing past them, 'certain of their deaths'. It is in extremis that we find what we are capable of, especially acts of great courage and altruism. Just as the community of lower Manhattan discovered, to its surprise, that it was a community; so, too, the inhabitants of a small village in Derbyshire, in 1666, finding cases of bubonic plague amongst them, reluctantly decided to seal themselves off, to prevent the infection spreading any further. They knew that many of them would die, but also that this voluntary quarantine would save people in neighbouring villages and halt the spread of the disease.

In Year of Wonders, Geraldine Brooks tells the story of this village, though her account is presented entirely as fiction, not documentary history. The narrative is voiced through Anna Frith, a miner's widow, who also helps out at the rectory. The rector's wife has taught Anna how to read. She and Anna build a shy friendship as they care for the sick together. Conveniently positioned in the middle of the village's social hierarchy, Anna observes not only the companionate marriage of the rector and his wife, but all the other villagers, as the miners and their families struggle with individual deaths and their increasingly desperate sense of their own mortality. The rector, Mompellion, a charismatic young preacher, persuades the villagers to cloister themselves as a form of spiritual testing and refinement. 'Like the ore that must be melted all to liquid to find the pure metal, so must we be rendered in the fiery furnace of this disease ... let us not flinch, let us not fail! Let us choose not the dull luster of our base state when God would have us shine!' His own more personal 'rendering' is not revealed until much later in the novel, with devastating effect.

As Camus revealed so brilliantly in La Peste, the plague town, or village, almost necessarily translates its physical infection into moral terms. Brooks's novel has no such overt allegorical layering (Camus's novel was a thinly veiled study of Paris under Nazi occupation), yet her village similarly implodes, as underlying class, familial, sexual and religious tensions gradually rise to the surface. There is no omniscient voice seeking to draw out these patterns, though, not even in the novel's flashback structure. Brooks's narrator, Anna, is witness to all the events as they unfold in the novel; and she makes sense of these events, one by one, as local, personal stories.

The narrative begins towards the end of the plague year, with Anna trying to tempt the rector, traumatised by what he has brought about in the village, to eat. 'I took an apple that was crisp and good and sliced it, thin as paper, and carried it into that dim room where he sits, still and silent.' This is typical of Anna's voice, in its simple syntax, and spare imagery. One of the easy traps of historical fiction is that the characters can end up sounding like cartoon or parodic versions of 'period' stereotypes. Similarly, historical fiction writers can find themselves so unwilling to discard any detail of their painstaking archival and background research that the novel appears cluttered with 'real' street names, obscure items of clothing and food, regional dialects, and so on.

Brooks's task is made easier, of course, through the geographical and social isolation of the village. Anna moves through a small and shrinking, but brilliantly realised, world. Recognisable set pieces of witchcraft trials, or the punitive régimes of the flagellant, make an appearance, but these scenes never seem generic. When the single woman, Anys Gowdie, who sleeps with strange men and who knows the healing properties of plants and herbs, is accused of witchcraft, the scene unfolds with dramatic particularity. 'Her cap had fallen off and the tendrils of her wet hair fell about her like strange golden snakes. A trickle of bright blood ran from her mouth.' So engrossing is the narrative that one is rarely tempted to wonder about the spread of plague elsewhere, or when we might hear of the great fire that burned London in September of the same year.

Year of Wonders is the moving story of a community, but it is also the account of a survivor, one whose metal has indeed been tested and 'refined' through suffering, and one whose voice powerfully registers those changes, in ways that seem both recognisably historical and also uncannily modern.