‘The Secret Chord’ strikes a contradictory view of David
Although the long life of David, King of Israel, is chronicled extensively in the Old Testament, the image that most of us have of him was provided by Michelangelo in the form of the world’s most famous statue, depicting David in a single moment. There he stands in the Accademia in Florence, staring down Goliath, his slender body tensed for the coming battle with a giant.
There’s much more to David — bare-knuckled politician, progenitor of an unruly dynasty, poet, composer, author of many of the Psalms — than the role of legendary warrior who lived nearly a millennium before Christ. It’s believed that he also was an ancestor of Jesus, not to mention a wife-stealer, a polygamist and, on the battlefield, as brutal as Attila the Hun or Genghis Khan. You opposed him at your peril. He might weep for you, as he did so famously for his own rebellious son, Absalom, but only after you were dead.
It’s this David we meet in The Secret Chord, the beautiful, subtle, grave new novel by Geraldine Brooks. For Brooks, a former journalist who won the Pulitzer Prize for March (2005), David is interesting not for his status as the most beautiful man in art history but rather for his matrix of contradictions, his prodigious talents at least balanced, if not nullified, by his instinct for self-gratification.
This he sometimes pursues, in The Secret Chord, with a vengeance, often at the expense of others. Brooks introduces him to us as a middle-aged and rather petulant tyrant, fuming in his chambers after the calamity of having his own life saved in battle. Why? Because it made him appear weak in the eyes of his men, or so he complains. To his adviser and historian, Natan ( better known as Nathan), he gripes that his nephew, who had thrown himself between David and the spear meant to kill him, has shown him up. “I wanted to strike him dead,” the bitter king tells Natan. “I wanted to grasp the end of that shattered staff and plunge it through his side.”
A little gratitude wouldn’t hurt, don’t you think? But no. What matters most to David is his grip on power.
In this warts-and-all narrative, we piece together the events and forces that have made David who he is. And we see that magnificent, sometimes monstrous creature in action.