Woman Of The World

The Age

Saturday December 15, 2007

Janet Hawley

Once, she was a shy, sickly schoolgirl longing for a little adventure. Now Geraldine Brooks - foreign correspondent turned Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist - tells Janet Hawley how life became more interesting than she'd ever believed possible.

LOOKING WILD-HAIRED AND WRITERLY, GERALDINE BROOKS meets me at the small plane that hops passengers from Boston to Martha's Vineyard, where she now lives. It's a leafy island off the New England coast, a private playground for the rich and famous (think Kennedys and Clintons) in summer, but it's also a quiet year-round haven for several artists, musicians and writers.

Her life today as a Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist is a far cry from her "previous gig". For 11 years, petite Australian-born Brooks was a Wall Street Journal foreign correspondent covering the Middle East and then the United Nations, "with a sub-specialty in the world's shit-holes, chaos and crisis spots".

As we sit eating steamed clams by a wintry beach, yacht masts clanging, it feels almost surreal discussing her former life, reporting gruesome wars and famines in Iraq, Kurdistan, Eritrea, Saudi Arabia, Somalia and Bosnia, alongside several media colleagues who never made it home alive.

Absorbed in her job, she'd head off with her flak jacket, bulletproof helmet, gas suit, chador, silk "king suit" for VIP interviews, field dressings, antibiotics and syringe. "Geraldine is fearless," remarks husband Tony Horwitz, when I ask if he ever worried about her.

Writers, it is said, are always loitering with intent; and it was late one night in a darkened bar in war-torn Bosnia, in 1995, when Brooks was struck by an idea. Twelve years on, that idea has led to her new novel, People of the Book, an imaginative tour de force to be published by HarperCollins next month. The story follows the turbulent, mystery-laden, 650-year history of a small, priceless religious text, the Sarajevo Haggadah.

"Ideas for books are strange, elusive things," Brooks ventures. "Hemingway said the idea for a novel can be some casual thing you're lucky enough to overhear; or it can be the wreck of your whole damned life." Her delicate face and voice break into one of her frequent cascades of pixie laughter, a frail image that totally belies her iron will and intellectual rigour. Brooks was never the hardened, ballsy female war correspondent from central casting. Demure, slight-framed, with a sweet smile (she could have stepped out of her favourite childhood book, Little Women), she seemed the most unlikely person for the role. This was undoubtedly part of her skill, along with her empathetic approach.

"I think Hemingway would approve that I heard the idea in a war-zone bar, as journalist colleagues drank and discussed the day's carnage. The odd reckless sexual liaison was doubtless being negotiated too," she adds, another of her acute observations about the fever pitch of war being a powerful aphrodisiac - a topic that we'll get onto later.

THE BAR TALK DRIFTED TO THE FATE OF THE SARAJEVO HAGGADAH. THIS WAS a beautiful 14th-century illuminated book - thought to have been made as a wedding present - of the prayers and stories used in Jewish homes at Passover to recount the exodus of the Jews from slavery in Egypt. "It was the greatest treasure of the 200,000-volume library at Bosnia's National Museum, as it symbolised Bosnia's tradition of multi-ethnic tolerance," Brooks explains.

"In 1992, when the dirty ethnic-cleansing war began, shattering this ideal, Bosnian Serbs shelled Sarajevo, targeting repositories of culture. The Mus-lim museum director ran through sniper fire and exploding mortars to save the Haggadah, and hid it in a bank vault. Now the Haggadah had gone missing, yet again. Speculation was rife ... the Muslim government had sold it for millions to buy armaments; Mossad had spirited it off to Israel ..."

The Haggadah remained an itch in her mind, as Brooks's first-hand knowledge of the world's religions grew apace and she witnessed the rise in fundamentalism. When the Haggadah reappeared, she watched a white-gloved UN-appointed conservator work on the 107 pages of richly illustrated parchment. She became fascinated with the bigger story of what this small exquisite codex symbolised. For more than six centuries it had -survived from one persecution crisis to the next, often saved by respectful people of different faiths putting their own lives at risk.

"What captured my interest further," says Brooks, "is this book was made in 14th-century Spain during Con-vivencia, a flourishing period when Jews, Muslims and Christians lived and worked together harmoniously. This ended in the 15th century, with the Inquisition, and King Ferdinand and Queen Isabel's expulsion of Muslims and Jews. The parallels between that period in Spain, and the ethnic cleansing in Bosnia, were painfully apparent."

The Sarajevo Haggadah was smuggled out of Spain. It travelled to Venice and in 1609 was spared from the ongoing destruction of Hebrew books when the official censor of the Pope's Inquisition declared that it had nothing objectionable in it. Finally it was brought to Sarajevo, where expelled Jews had found safe haven and, in 1894, was acquired by the National Museum.

"During World War II when Nazis came looking for the Haggadah, the Catholic museum director tricked them into believing a Nazi colonel had taken it the previous day. Meanwhile a Muslim librarian was hiding it in the mountains," Brooks continues.

The author has used this scant factual history of the Haggadah as the framework on which to build her work of fiction, vividly imagining the characters who owned, saved and persecuted the Sarajevo Haggadah, in wildly different scenarios over the centuries. Although People of the Book is fiction, Brooks admits "you write fiction from what you know".

Brooks is 52, and it's as if she's mined her whole life experience of people, religion, love, war, torture and ghastly gore for this new book. And her timing couldn't be more apt as war and religious tensions between Christian, Muslim and Jew now seem to dominate every media screen.

BROOKS LIVES NOW IN A FORMER SCHOOLMASTER'S roomy Greek Revival house, set amid peaceful oak and dogwood-lined avenues of gracious white timber Cape Cod homes with grey shingled roofs.

She juggles writing in her top-storey study with a full-on domestic lifestyle, caring for her burgeoning household: American husband, fellow former foreign correspondent now author, Tony Horwitz, their son Nathaniel, 11, nephew journalist Sam Bungey, three yapping dogs and an organic vegetable garden. She and Tony are in the process of adopting a five-year-old Ethiopian boy.

Brooks's widowed mother, Gloria, whose challenging mind inspired her two daughters' fertile imaginations, recently arrived to live with them too. She is now in her own strange world of Alzheimer's and, in a kind of wafty happiness, she sits in a sunny corner of the kitchen, knitting and chatting with passers-by.

When I arrive to stay for a few days, I'm not the only visitor. There are painters clambering over the house on long ladders, and all of us disturb Brooks's routine and the high-strung canine trio. Milo, an Australian kelpie, needs an anti-barking collar; Shiloh the border collie is on anti-depressants to stop her from biting; and Simba, Gloria's miniature Pomeranian, is a squirt competing for affection.

Brooks takes it all in her stride, just as she does major calamities like the breast cancer she suffered a few years ago. "I had the full blast of chemotherapy and radiotherapy. I told them to give me everything you've got, and thankfully I seem to be rid of it. I have a mammogram yearly, then try to forget it."

Brooks relates this as we walk the dogs through an island forest, where scarlet and gold falling autumn leaves remind her of a line in Larry Buttrose's poem, My Country. She recites the whole poem, leading to leaves falling "in a silent firework". Poetry is one of her great loves. "Poetry played a big part in my courtship with Tony," she smiles.

THIS ONCE SICKLY, SHY, BOOKISH CONVENT GIRL from a lower-middle-class home in Bland Street, in Ashfield in Sydney's inner-west, never dreamed she and her elder sister, Darleen Bungey, would -really head out and take on the world, both in highly successful careers. (Bungey has just published an acclaimed biography of painter Arthur Boyd, and Brooks refers to the book's "gorgeosity".)

As a youngster, Geraldine suffered a debilitating illness thought to be rheumatic fever, and missed much of primary school. Encouraged by her mother, a radio station publicist, home became her imaginary world - each part of the garden representing a different country, each flower a different person. "We'd have bets over how long it would take me to memorise a Shakespeare -soliloquy," she happily recalls.

Her American-born father, Lawrie Brooks, a big band singer turned newspaper proofreader, encouraged her interest in politics, especially standing up for the underdog.

She read voraciously, and "envied people who led lives of risk and adventure". Aged eight, she gathered a group of penfriends across Australia, America, France and the Middle East, and decided she wanted to become a journalist.

After a BA at Sydney University, she joined The Sydney Morning Herald, excelled as a reporter, and won a scholarship to Columbia University in the US, where she fell in love with a fellow student, Horwitz, son of a Washington neurosurgeon -father and writer mother. She started working for The Wall Street Journal, but her father became ill, so she and Horwitz married and moved to Australia. Horwitz worked for the Herald, and Brooks set up The Wall Street Journal's Australian bureau, operating out of their home in Balmain.

"I'd been to New Zealand on a global warming story about scientists measuring methane from sheep farts," she recalls, "when a wildcard phone call came from the foreign editor, asking me to be their new Middle East correspondent.

"I was ridiculously unqualified for it. But this little girl who'd always envied people who led lives of risk and adventure - and who didn't really know what that meant - said yeah, yeah! A month later, as I set off, I realised how woefully under-prepared I was for this gig," she admits.

Horwitz went with her to work freelance, later also joining The Wall Street Journal. Initially based in Cairo, they re-based themselves in London, then Virginia, two work-obsessed story hunters regularly flying in and out of their beats. "We had a huge amount to learn about the region, how to operate there, and helped each other enormously," says Brooks. Both had the added complication of being Jewish reporters in the Middle East. Brooks, a lapsed Catholic, had converted when she married Horwitz.

Brooks, being Brooks, always reported with a different eye. In 1991 when Saddam Hussein brutally suppressed the Kurdish uprising, Brooks was in the Kurdish city of Kirkuk, standing with some male reporters on the roof of a partly shelled mudbrick house. "The guys wanted the military story and were questioning the Kurds - what kind of weapons, how many tanks, how big were the shells?" she remembers. "I just stared at the clothesline on the roof. The sun had come out after the rain, and someone had strung up a load of washing, baby clothes, towels. Hens were scratching for scattered grain. I was more concerned with the women in that wrecked house, trying to keep children calm, wash nappies, feed the hens and carry on with life's practicalities ... Life goes bloody on, even under attack."

In the Middle East she wore a full black chador, befriended and interviewed Muslim women, gaining insights into daily life behind the veil that defied stereotypes. She read the Koran - "I'll study anything" - and analysed how it had been misused to justify oppression of women.

Brooks got to know Ayatollah Khomeini's daughter Zahra in Iran, and was invited into the lives of Queen Noor and King Hussein of Jordan, becoming a regular dinner guest at the palace. Later she wrote an acclaimed book on the hidden world of Islamic women, Nine Parts of Desire.

THE TIDE TURNED WHEN BROOKS, AGED 38, was falsely arrested as a spy in Nigeria, and spent three days on a concrete floor wondering if she'd survive. "I haven't even had a child yet," she kept thinking.

When Brooks was expelled from Nigeria, she went back home to Virginia, where the couple then lived. "I was sitting on the porch with Tony, carving Halloween pumpkins. The phone kept ringing and I wouldn't answer it. I knew it was the foreign editor wanting me to fly to Iraq again, and I just didn't want to interrupt this beautiful autumn day to go. My heart was no longer in it, I was weary of risking my life to write about messy wars. I was suffering major burnout, so I resigned."

Motherhood followed, and Brooks let her imagination loose writing books. First came Foreign Corres-pondence (tracking down her childhood penpals), then Year of Wonders (which sold 500,000 internationally). Her novel March (sales of 400,000 internationally) won the 2006 Pulitzer Prize, making it a two-Pulitzer household, Hor-witz having previously won his for journalism.

Horwitz was writing books, too: Baghdad Without a Map and Other Misadventures in Arabia; Confederates in the Attic; and Into the Blue: Boldly Going Where Captain Cook Has Gone Before.

Each is the other's greatest supporter; they first-edit each other's books, and they admit to influencing each other. "I was quite content to remain in America, but trailed off after Geraldine, travelling to places I'd never otherwise have gone," says Horwitz. Brooks adds: "Back living in America, I begrudgingly trailed along with Tony who adored attending Civil War re-enactments to research his Confederates book, then found an idea for a book of my own." Thus came March, about the absent father in Little Women, the preacher off with the Civil War troops.

Brooks's first two historical novels - Year of Wonders, set in 1666 in plague-ridden England, and March - give no clue the author is Australian. But she's clearly outed as Australian in People of the Book, which interweaves a historical and contemporary narrative. The main contemporary character, Hanna Heath, a specialist medieval book conservator hired by the UN, is a sharp-eyed Australian loner with a caustic wit.

Heath arrives in bomb-blasted Sarajevo to start work on the Haggadah and immediately begins a casual love affair with Ozren Karaman, the dishevelled Muslim museum librarian who risked his life to save it.

Brooks says perkily: "I am not sexually reckless, but this is behaviour I've observed. Something weird happens in situations of high risk ... I've thought about this a lot. It's a zest for life and a kind of recklessness. I saw numerous inappropriate things happen in the press corps, people getting into disastrous liaisons. Yet it's that old truism - nothing amplifies life more than to be at the edge of death."

Heath, an eager scholar, finds tiny artefacts in the Haggadah's binding - an insect wing, a white hair, along with wine stains, traces of salt, and missing clasps. The narrative then dives into the past to unlock the secrets of each clue and meet the people involved with the Haggadah's journey.

In Vienna, in 1894, we meet a syphilitic bookbinder; in Venice, 1609, a rabbi with a secret gambling addiction and his alcoholic Catholic priest friend. In Seville, 1420, a slave girl summonsed to the emir's harem becomes an admired painter; in Sarajevo, 1940, a young laundress joins the partisans fighting Nazi invaders. The latter is a favourite theme of Brooks, drawn from memories in combat zones and -refugee camps.

"Women with restricted domestic lives are suddenly hit by a catastrophe. They step out of their old roles, lead families to safety across mined mountain passes and become breadwinners against extraordinary odds."

DRIVING OUT TO A FARM TO COLLECT SOME organic chickens, we pass singer-songwriter Carly Simon's house. Further along is Caroline Kennedy's retreat, inherited from her mother Jackie. "Caroline is quiet, charming; looks more like her father," Brooks says.

She and Horwitz moved to Martha's Vineyard permanently two years ago, when their rural Virginia village was invaded by a lava flow of McMansions. Horwitz, who had friends on the island, had courted Brooks here, and Brooks had her own link, via an American penpal who stayed here.

Another resident, the late William Styron, author of Sophie's Choice, used to say: "The historic novelist works best when fed on short rations." Brooks recalls this, adding she agrees. "I like just enough facts to use as handholds to give a sense of authenticity, then I let my imagination do the rest."

Brooks spent so much time enmeshed in the harrowing side of life - war, death, disease, the aftermath of torture - and yet she's back writing about it in fiction. She doesn't shy away from any-thing disturbing, be it horrendous details of torture or graphic descriptions of suppurating syphilis and equally hideous ancient cures.

"I don't consider myself a dark soul," she says, "I think I'm a sunny, optimistic person, but when I'm writing I get drawn to these yuck things I've witnessed. I've got this little inner Stephen King that I need to feed. For better or worse, I know these things, and they re-emerge in my writer's mind."

Brooks has seen a lot of corpses. "The first time was an Iran/Iraq battlefield, where teenage forces on both sides were slaughtering each other. Iraq had just won 500 metres of territory, now blanketed with Iranian corpses. It was so hot, and from the distance it resembled piles of rags in the dust, being dived on by vultures. Coming closer it was hundreds of corpses."

One young man she can never forget. "It was in Kurdistan - so beautiful, green mountains, blossoming fruit trees. This young man was lying on his back in a grassy field, dotted with fragrant jonquils, as if he was gazing up thinking it was a glorious day. But when I got close, I saw half his face was blown away."

WHEN BROOKS FINISHED PEOPLE OF THE BOOK, what struck her about the 650- year sweep of history she'd covered was the repetition of lessons never learned. "We human beings have at various times found a way to appreciate and celebrate difference," she begins, impassioned. "Then suddenly this horrible fear of the other rises up, and smashes a vibrant merging society - then we have to crawl our way back up out of the ashes of that destruction. We do it again and again, and it is so stupid."

The Sarajevo Haggadah's roller-coaster history saw the text imperilled four times over - with the expulsion of Jews from Spain, the Inquisition in Europe, the rise of the Nazis and, finally, ethnic cleansing in the Balkans. "We're standing in it again right now," she sighs, "that's why I wrote the book the way I did. People seem to be very resistant to the idea that there was a time when Islam was the world's intellectual guiding light. Spain under the Muslim emirs was a much better place than it was under Ferdinand and Isabel." Indeed, Hanna Heath, "a typical Aussie atheist", ends up falling greatly in love with the Muslim librarian.

So Brooks maintains her idealistic view of the world, where Muslims, Jews, Christians, can all peacefully cross-fertilise and enrich each other?

"Yes - why not?" she says seriously. "I don't think it's an idealistic vision, it's a realistic vision. The alternative is demented. War never works, it's such a primitive way to effect change. We've a classic example now in Iraq. But we are a brutal species and fall into war so easily. Look how quickly young people can be turned into torturers.

"I'm more pessimistic than I was 10 years ago. In the '70s, it seemed the world was ready to change towards a more mature understanding of each other. Now we've skidded backwards into a really vile time."

EARLY FRIDAY MORNING, BROOKS IS BUSILY BANGING around her kitchen, making French toast for Gloria's breakfast, chocolate chip pancakes for Nathaniel. She starts kneading challah - the Jewish plaited loaf traditionally eaten on Friday nights - and plans a menu for tonight's dinner party: seafood gumbo, rice, salads, blueberry pie.

The painters arrive and the dogs bark crazily. Brooks sidelines Milo and slips on his de-barking collar, which emits discouraging zaps. "Live better electrically," she quips, patting the dog's nose.

Why is she drawn to writing historical fiction?

"I'm truly baffled as to why I keep on writing about the past - when I wouldn't want to live in the past," she replies. "But I like the research, trying to figure out the puzzles of the past. And I love the act of emotional empathy, when you imagine your way into the past, into the hearts and lives of others. Likewise, I'm baffled why I keep writing about people of faith, when I'm not one."

I'm curious why she converted to become a Jew, indeed studied for a year to do so, when she remains an atheist. It seems a conundrum.

"I suppose it does, but Tony is a nonbelieving Jew, too," she says. "In Judaism, religion is handed down through the mother, so if I wasn't Jewish it would mean I'd be wiping out Tony's family heritage, and I didn't want to do that.

"I find Judaism very engaging, the history, the ethics and the language. I don't believe in a deity, that doesn't do anything for me; but I do connect with the idea that in Judaism there is a blessing for everything. You bless the bread, wine, first evening star, the dew on the ground. Don't look for God in the heavens, look for God in daily things, and be mindful not to let your life slip away. I'm always saying little prayers about things I notice."

But no way does she accept "the whole Jewish box and dice". She and Tony rage over extremist behaviour by Israel towards Palestinians, just as they rage over Palestinian extremists' behaviour.

Did she ever pray when caught up in fighting? "No, because I didn't expect any answer."

In war situations that could terrify others, "a weird kind of tranquillity would overtake me," she admits. "The intensity was so incredible that I felt more vibrating and alive than I'd ever been. It's an endorphin thing. It's true for a lot of -people, including soldiers."

In her reporting career, Brooks saw technology leap from delivering stories via telex or dictation to copytakers, to satellite phones and laptops. The foreign correspondent's job also became more dangerous, with journalists deliberately targeted, kidnapped and killed. She and Horwitz were -horrified when their Wall Street Journal colleague Daniel Pearl was beheaded.

While they stay in touch with journalist colleagues, Brooks is off Queen Noor's A-list. "I was very close to Noor, until I wrote Nine Parts of Desire. To my surprise, she hated it. I thought it was a highly flattering portrayal of her significant role in Jordan. I guessed she was annoyed because I'd pointed out her influence with King Hussein. But no. She was pissed off because I mentioned the gold-plated faucets in their bathroom!"

During our last outing at the Vineyard, picking vegetables and flowers at an organic produce -co-op she belongs to, Brooks acknowledges she never dreamed her life would turn out this way. "It's kinda alarming. I just wanted to go overseas, have a bit of adventure, then live in Sydney for-ever. But I fell in love with an American who's besotted with writing books about American history. Our marriage has been one long domestic argument, over which country we live in."

As a Herald journalist she covered the Franklin river campaign, rafting down the Tasmanian river with Senator Don Chipp. "It was a peak experience of my life seeing so much natural beauty, and I've been a passionate environmentalist since.

"I'd love to go home to Australia and use this decade to be involved with green politics. Future generations will look back on our generation and condemn us. 'How could you squander the resources of the planet, when you knew how precarious the future of nature is?' But I'm not sure if anyone would be interested in someone who's been away for this long, and in what I have to say."

Standing on the American island's foreshore, a long way from Australia, she admits: "That's a road not taken. That increasingly niggles me ..."

Janet Hawley flew to the US courtesy of HarperCollins.

© 2007 The Age

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