Yesterday, over on her blog, Susan was writing about the Banned Book Challenge and she mentioned that for one of the books she was going to read she had chosen Cornelia Funke’s Inkheart.  Inkheart a banned book? What sort of mind do you have to have to ban Inkheart?  Indeed, what is going through the mind of someone who bans any book?  For it seems to me, that it is only a short step from banning a book to burning a book and as Geraldine Brooks reminds us in her new novel, People of the Book, book burnings are [a]lways the forerunners.  Heralds of the stake, the ovens, the mass graves.

People of the Book is about the Sarajevo Haggadah, a fifteenth century  illuminated book of Jewish Passover prayers that first came to light in 1894 and which survived both the book burnings of the Nazis and the shelling of Sarajevo during the Bosnian War only as a result of the courage of the Muslim librarians who had it in their charge.  Brooks has taken what is known of the history of this incredible artefact and built around it a novel that tells of its conservation and of the journey that it might have taken to reach Sarajevo via Venice, where it is known to have been in the seventeenth century, from the place of its creation.  The story she tells, which, as she makes clear, is, bar the bare facts, entirely fictitious, is one of religious and racial intolerance and persecution stretching back through the ages.  It is the story of the last seven hundred years of European and Middle Eastern conflict based on the refusal of successive generations of religious extremists to recognise the fact that diverse cultures influence and enrich one another.  It is the story of centuries of book burnings and of the genocidal horrors to which they were a prequel.  Sitting here writing now in the midst of the storm of controversy surrounding the Archbishop of Canterbury’s lecture regarding Sharia Law, it is frighteningly too like the story of the present day. 

The book is structured to reflect the way in which the Haggadah itself is constructed, that is in a series of quires sewn together.  Brooks interleaves the journey Hanna, the modern day conservator, makes as she tries to make sense of the evidence derived from her examination of the manuscript with that of the manuscript itself.  The novel is a mixture of history lesson and detective fiction with the human interest of Hanna’s exploration of her own past brought into the mix as well.  There has been some criticism of this in some reviews I’ve read, but I didn’t find it a problem.  For me, the passage into the past to explore the intolerances and worse of previous ages only serves to highlight those of our own far more recent and present history.

If I do have a problem with the book it is that I think Brooks has perhaps tried to examine too many themes.  She considers the pressing need for people to have not only their freedom, but also their own country and the repetition of the lines from a sonnet by Gerard Manley Hopkins, What I do is me, for that I came. suggest an interest in the need to express who we are in the way best suited to us neither of which I feel is ever fully explored.  Nevertheless, I think this is a fine novel and one that I am very pleased to have read.  For me, it is at least on a par with her Pulitzer winner, March, and I now very much want to go back and read any earlier work of hers that I can find.  Can anyone recommend anything?