People of the Book, a work of fiction which deals with a series of real and documented human tragedies, spanning a half-millennium across the Mediterranean, comes to us with a blurb from USA Today, favorably equating it with The Da Vinci Code of 2003, that despicable libel against the Catholic church based entirely on absurd speculation. What are we to make of this? Has the genre of the historical novel really declined so precipitately that any fantasy about the past, once committed to print, is considered respectable literature?
A less favorable parallel between the two books was drawn by the London Jewish Chronicle in its issue of February 22, 2008. Readers were warned of the possibility that the invented and nonsensical details in Geraldine Brooks’s production would become accepted as veridical: “people remember things like this, like with The Da Vinci Code,” said Helen Walasek, a British art editor and expert on cultural heritage.
The Australian-born Brooks is best known as the author of the 1995 volume Nine Parts of Desire: The Hidden World of Islamic Women, a travelogue through the Middle East. People of the Book has been a success, if on a scale somewhat less massive than Dan Brown’s Da Vincicontrivance. Its impact was of the sort that guarantees the inclusion of a clueless “Readers’ Guide,” with risible book club questions, bound at its end. (Sample: “There is an amazing array of
