Year of Wonders by Geraldine Brooks

When the villagers of Eyam, Derbyshire, made the decision to quarantine themselves to prevent spreading the plague in 1666 they risked painful and grotesque deaths. Geraldine Brooks came across their story when holidaying in the English countryside, a lush, green, respite from her work as the Middle East correspondent for the Wall Street Journal. She was so touched by the villagers’ resolution that she decided it was the story she really wanted to tell and penned Year of Wonders, a fictionalised account of their ordeal sprinkled with anecdotes that had been passed down over the years.

Eyam’s terrible year is recounted through the eyes of housemaid Anna Firth, a timid and unlikely heroine at the book’s opening. She sees her family and the villagers perish one after the other, and then witnesses the survivors turn on each other. Year of Wonders is a story of both the best and worst of humanity; after the villagers make the selfless decision to quarantine themselves some commit to caring for the sick, while others give way to violence and hysteria, or prey on the hardships of others with opportunistic trickery. For the Black Death is not the only killer in Eyam, the ugly side of human nature claims more than one life.

Anna is taken under the wing of her employer, the rector’s wife Elinor, as a kind of protégée. She matures from a completely illiterate servant to Elinor’s trusted friend, confidant and advisor, as well as a sought-after herb dabbler and midwife. As the plague peaks and then diminishes the story gradually becomes concerned with the complex relationships between Anna, Elinor and her preacher husband Michael Mompellion. These connections see Anna go from the transformed to the transformer as she seeks to aid Mompellion, she becomes a kind of empowered Jane Eyre.

Brooks evokes the disgusting nature of the disease with skill: “I almost dropped the pitcher in my shock. The fair young face of the evening before was gone from the pallet in front of me. George Viccars lay with his head pushed to the side by a lump the size of a newborn piglet, a great, shiny, yellow-purple nob of pulsing flesh. His face, half turned away from me because of the excrescence, was flushed scarlet, or rather, blotched with shapes like rings of rose petals blooming under his skin. His blond hair was a dark, wet mess upon his head, and his pillow was drenched with sweat. There was a sweet, pungent smell in the garret. A smell like rotting apples.” Yet Brooks tells this tale of suffering, love, friendship and sacrifice so masterfully that even I, of a squeamish disposition, remained transfixed to the end. We live in a time where a new epidemic is perceived to be lurking in the not too far off future, and so to survive the Black Death alongside Anna in 1666, with little sophisticated medicine, no antibiotics and ignorance and superstition rife amongst the population was both a fascinating and terrifying experience.