The Secret Chord

By Geraldine Brooks
2015
352 pages / 13 hours and 6 minutes
Fiction

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One very rare occasion I suppose the cover of a song is better than the original. Peter Paul and Mary’s cover of “Blowing in the Wind” is probably better than Dylan’s. But generally covers are unfavorable when compared to the original masterpiece. It actually takes considerable nerve to sing “White Christmas” if you are not Bing Crosby. I would be foolish to suggest that UB40’s cover of “I Can’t Help Falling in Love With You” is any competition for Elvis’s performance. And yet, while different, it is superb. Go take a listen; I will wait till you get back.

But I am not talking about music here, I am talking about literature. So let me begin with the original – an unquestioned masterpiece of ancient storytelling. By general consensus, it is the absolute high point of biblical literature. In the current divisions of our Bibles, it lands in 1 and 2 Samuel and the first chapter of 1 Kings. The story of David as it is presented here would be magnificent literature even if one didn't believe in the authority of Scripture. The characters are complex, multidimensional, and morally ambiguous, and the plot has you racing to get to the next episode. If you are going to try to tell this story you are bound to finish a distant second to the original.

So while Geraldine Brooks’s The Secret Chord, a fictionalized telling of the David story, could never displace the biblical account, it is like UB40's cover – superb. Brooks is a Pulitzer Prize-winning author and she clearly has enormous respect for her material. I concur with the assessment of Alana Newhouse in the New York Times Book Review: “a thundering, gritty, emotionally devastating reconsideration of the story of King David – makes a masterly case for the generative power of retelling.”

Of all the characters in the Hebrew Bible, none is developed with the depth and complexity of David. Who is this man? The one chosen by God and yet so very very flawed. The dysfunction in this family makes even our messed up families look healthy by comparison. Violent, politically conniving, yet capable of great generosity and a man of unflinching courage, David is the epitome of the flawed human beings through whom God chooses to work.

In Brooks’s telling, the book is narrated by Nathan the prophet. I like it already. Most of us have known the story of David for so long we cannot remember what it was like to hear it the first time. This novel allows us to hear this familiar story all over again. Brooks takes the license that any novelist must in writing historical fiction, but her depiction of David rings true to me. And she is particularly excellent in bringing the historical and cultural setting to life. It was a very tough world.

Read this book. By the end, I’m guessing you will have more appreciation for the art of this biblical narrative than you had before. And an even greater appreciation that God finds a way to use David, who is not a plaster saint, but every bit a broken human vessel.