The Secret Chord
by Geraldine Brooks
First Posted on November 2015
My optometrist told me that around 42 most people start needing reading glasses.
…yeah. Anyway, I remember reading this book back before the physical embarrassments of old age began to accrue, and it has always been my touchstone for the wealth of re-imagined myth and legend. I think it might be even better now than I remember it, but gone for me are the days where I will reread a book for pleasure. Time is finite, another realization that hits harder when your body starts reminding you.
The monotheistic triumvirate of Islam, Judaism, and Christianity all have something to say about David, King of Israel. Outside of its religious foundation, King David is a standard feature in secular culture, true mimesis before the internet slop cycle compressed the concept of memes into image macros with specific font. Michelangelo's Statue of David has been co-opted to sell everything from aprons to magnets to Florentine tourism; the Star of David is a ubiquitous symbol; the story of David versus Goliath is such a well-worn parable it can be conjured in the mind from the merest utterance. “Goliath” is itself Western Society’s first recorded eponym, a proper name elided into representation for an entire concept.
When 2013 found Malcolm Gladwell telling the readers of his unequivocally titled book David and Goliath: Underdogs, Misfits, and the Art of Battling Giants that they were thinking about David and Goliath incorrectly, and then explaining that David played to his strengths rather than submitting to a battlefield where his opponent has the advantage—and that the twist was that the readers actually already knew that all along—there seemed few choice morsels left to pick off the overworked corpse of this story.
Thus was the landscape The Secret Chord found itself surveying; it is a title that does not lean on its legacy to entice a readership, a title that makes no attempt to bait with casual familiarity those already comfortable with the tale. The temporal weft and weave as the words wrap around the narrator—stroking him with fragile tendrils while he reminisces with his own past—veers off from David when it suits him, or when it suits the greater thrust of the story. Interviews are conducted and the legends we know become frames around a more pressing tale; one filled with the urgency of an eye-witness parsing fact from gossip. When they end—and with them, the unearthed truths they proffer—the reader is thrust back into the framework storyline, the vibrancy and the immediacy of new truths fading like a dream upon waking:
“Is that all?” I said, rather more sharply than I intended. “I was hoping you might go on.”
“Go on? Why should I go on? Shammah can better tell about the Wadi Elah. Shammah, and others who were there. My part in the story is of no significance beyond what I have told you. Be content.”
The reader and the narrator both feel the want for the story within to continue apace. But then we are left without. Until, of course, the next time Natan, our narrator, begins an interview or a remembrance of things past; the active timeline—like reality—feels like an impediment waiting to be shed, a necessary molting in service of the heart of the narrative. The reader may recognize that the interstitial stories that so enthrall the reader—as well as the narrator—are woven by the same hand as the rest of the novel; the teller of Scheherazade’s’ story is, by logical necessity, as good a storyteller as Scheherazade herself.
It is in this way that A Secret Chord moves forward, pulling us back and forth through time: David as young, old, feeble, strong. His story is not only his own—not simply a tale of an Underdog or Chosen one—but a parable, of life transfixed in, and by, time itself. Time’s many facets are constantly glittering as they shift and reform, without cessation, in The Secret Chord:
And I hold within my hand
Grains of the golden sand—
How few! yet how they creep
Through my fingers to the deep,
while I weep — while I weep!
O God! can I not grasp
Them with a tighter clasp?
O God! can I not save
one from the pitiless wave?
Is all that we see or seem
But a dream within a dream?
The book is fantasy in the same vein as The Buried Giant, a dreamlike tale that carves out space for mystical wonder and fantastical occurrences without upending the social and political foundations of reality. David, far from perfect, feels believable compared to standard fantasy or fable characters who are often touched by the divine or go on to unite kingdoms or forge nations in peace and harmony. For all its biblical foundation—God and prophets and a chosen people—Goliath was just a man, albeit a large one. David had children that grew up spoiled and violent; David was a man inflamed by lusts; David was an upstart and usurper:
David is the first man in literature whose story is told in detail from early childhood to extreme old age. Some scholars have called this biography the oldest piece of history writing, predating Herodotus by at least half a millennium. Outside of the bible, however, David has left little trace. A single engraving uncovered at Tel Dan mentions his house. Some buildings of the Second Iron Age period might have been associated with a leader of his stature. But I tend to agree with Duff Cooper, who concluded that David must have actually existed, for no people would invent such a flawed figure for a national hero.
The beauty of The Secret Chord is not in the actual events within story—since most of us already know where it starts and where it ends—but in the telling of those events. Even the narrator knows the how is more important than the what as he searches out the tales while we peep over his shoulder. This is a narrative that adds beauty and depth to an already universal narrative—this is seeing Michelangelo’s Statue of David in Florence after a lifetime of spent amongst posters adorned with its image.