The art and craft of Geraldine Brooks

Geraldine Brooks is one of the most interesting women now engaged in the noble art and craft of writing. Like me, she is an exile from Australia. She took a degree in journalism in Sydney, proceeded to Columbia University in New York on a scholarship, and in short order became the Wall Street Journal’s correspondent in the Middle East where she became familiar with conditions in Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Iran, among other countries. She took a particular interest in the status and roles of women in Islamic societies. She doesn't say so but I think she must be able to speak and read Arabic.

The first of her books that I absorbed was Nine Parts of Desire. This provides Brooks's perspective and intimate portraits of the lives of women in Islamic societies, particularly in the very different societies of Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Iran, and elsewhere also in the Islamic world. The main message is that women are anything but suppressed, repressed and powerless. My own very superficial observations support this. In 1998 I was briefly a visiting professor at the American University in Beirut and an invited speaker at a regional conference of the International Epidemiological Association. I had the good fortune there to get acquainted with young men and women from every country in the Eastern Mediterranean Region of the World Health Organization from Afghanistan to Morocco. I was particularly impressed by the young women - by their high intelligence, their ability, dedication, insight, and motivation. I’ve also worked in other Islamic countries, and countries with large Moslem populations - Indonesia, India, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Pakistan and Turkey, where it would be hard not to observe striking cultural and behavioural differences in the status of Moslem women. In Ottawa I've met women graduate students from Iraq, Syria, Iran and Pakistan, but never had many opportunities for conversation outside seminar rooms, never got to know them as well as I did in a few weeks in Beirut in November and December of 1998. It was one of these young women in Beirut, a woman from Iran, who recommended that I should read Nine Parts of Desire to gain understanding of the status and roles of women in Islamic societies. The title of this fascinating book comes from the legend that God divided desire into ten parts, gave one part to men and nine parts to women. Geraldine Brooks writes with great empathy about the Moslem women she encountered. She makes it clear that in some respects women in the western world should envy rather than feel sorry for them.

Soon after that I read the first of Brooks's historical novels, Year of Wonders, which I greatly admired for her eloquent account of the impact of a highly lethal epidemic of the plague (the Black Death) on the  Derbyshire village of Eyam in 1666. Because of the insights on the people's reactions to the deadly plague epidemic, I added this book to my recommended reading for graduate students in epidemiology. Year of Wonders, and even more so, Caleb's Crossing, which is about the first native Indian graduate of Harvard University in the 17th century. demonstrate a remarkable ability to write convincingly in the language and style of the time in which the story is set, and to get inside the head and heart of the female protagonist. Brooks does the same in March, in which the leading character is brilliantly created from the shadowy figure who is away at the Civil War, the husband and father in the background of Louisa May Allcott's Little Women. She can get inside the head and heart of a male leading character almost as convincingly as she does with women characters.  March won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 2006.  She had to be an American citizen to win the Pulitzer Prize, and did so because she married an American, now lives on Martha's Vineyard with her husband, two sons, two dogs and a horse.

I also much admired People of the Book. This is about the wanderings of a (fictional) mediaeval Jewish illuminated manuscript lodged in the library in Sarajevo, and a fanciful account of a few of the people who came into contact with this priceless treasure, which is ultimately purloined and taken to Israel, leaving a skillful forgery in its place in Sarajevo.  My son, who was a UN and NATO peacekeeper in Bosnia, served on a Canadian-Israeli-Palestinian peace-building advisory group, and has a Jewish wife, admired this book too, for its insightful portrayal of the troubles in the former Yugoslavia, and the Israeli-Palestinian tensions in that unhappy corner of the world.

Brooks's journalism, e.g.http://www.salon.com/2002/12/04/islamic_women/ demonstrates that she is a serious scholar on the status of women in Islam.