Light shines on hidden world of Islam

MARGIE THOMSON talks to Readers and Writers Week guest Geraldine Brooks, author of acclaimed novel Year of Wonders and a best-selling study of women under Islam.

Geraldine Brooks' first novel, Year of Wonders (HarperCollins, $31.95), was published last year to the kind of glittering reception that first-time writers dream about. Brooks, however, was not a first-time writer, although you would be forgiven for not making the link between this captivating work of fiction, set in a plague-stricken English village in 1665-66, and her earlier books, which grew out of her day job as Middle East correspondent for the Wall Street Journal.

Nine Parts of Desire: The Hidden World of Islamic Women (Anchor Books, $27.95), published in 1994, is like an independent elder sibling to the later novel. Out in the world for some time, it carries on with its own life, having been reprinted numerous times. In the wake of the September 11 bombings, it has found a new home in the bestseller lists (it's at number seven here).

"I'm glad it's still out there, but I have mixed feelings about having to thank Osama bin Laden for its recent success," says Brooks, who visited New Zealand last week as part of Wellington's Readers and Writers Week. That book, she says, was "a real journalist's book, just going out and talking to people about their lives".

As a woman in Egypt, she was closed out of all but the most mundane stories, having to watch while her freelancer husband talked his way into far more interesting situations. After a year of fretting, she "looked up and noticed the window that was open only to me" - that is, talking to Islamic women about their lives and beliefs, which to her seemed the more enduring story behind the headlines.

She analyses the Koran, and draws distinctions between the imperatives of the religion and more recent cultural practices. Travelling from country to country, she busts many stereotypes.

One enduring image from the book is, among Lebanon's Hizbollah, Brooks going to visit at home a woman she has known only covered from head to toe in heavy black cloth. She is met at the door by the same woman with bleached hair in a silk negligee with a deep, plunging neckline.

Brooks, an Australian, still spends part of each year in her beloved Sydney - "I feel light of heart there" - and the rest of her time in a tiny village of "250 souls", as she puts it, in the foothills of Virginia.

She started on her career path when she won a scholarship to Colombia journalism school in New York. While there she applied for a summer internship with the WSJ, which turned into a fulltime job. The magazine eventually packed her off back to Australia to set up its first bureau there.

"And, actually, New Zealand had a part to play in all this," she laughs. She made a trip across the Tasman to investigate how it was that we had the cleanest air in the world, yet had all these millions of sheep, farting and releasing untold methane into the environment. Shortly after the story was published, Brooks received her first call from the newspaper's foreign editor. "I thought that was it, but she offered me the job of Middle East correspondent."

Six exciting years followed, the last few covering United Nations peacekeepers in horror-spots such as Somalia and Bosnia. "Shithole correspondent" is how Brooks learned to describe herself.

Nowadays, life is much quieter. War-zone reporting does not, Brooks believes, complement motherhood, and she and her husband now have 6-year-old Nathaniel to care for. Hence the shift to the small, quiet village, although as she has discovered, friendships and enmities can be more impassioned in small settings than they are in large urban environments.

It was this realisation that contributed to her being able to write with such resonance about that small 17th-century village in Year of Wonders.

The story is based on the true story of the Derbyshire village of Eyam, which in 1665 made the extraordinary decision to quarantine itself from the world to stop the spread of the plague. Brooks and her husband stumbled upon the village while out hiking, and visited the historic display in the parish church. It played on Brooks' mind, and she eventually returned and began researching, bringing all her journalist's research skill to bear, but also focusing her imagination to recreate the emotional landscape of that time.

Once you've made the connection between Brooks the journalist and Brooks the novelist, its easy to see the thematic attachments.

"There's something very odd about an atheist who can't keep away from religion," she admits.

Religion inevitably takes central stage in that 17th-century village, where the norm was to have a literal belief in God and all human suffering was seen as due punishment. Her main character Anna questions first the will and then the existence of God as she watches the families in her village endure such significant pain and loss. Later, her belief in tatters, she comes to love more the humane qualities of gentleness, wisdom and kindness.

At the end of the novel it is as if Brooks has been irresistibly drawn back to Islam, unable to keep her former self at bay.

"It's not just Islam," she insists. "People of faith fascinate me, not so much for their spirituality, but I'm intrigued by people who have these theological blueprints for their lives. I guess it's looking for a way of living without that that leads you to make the ethical choice rather than the expedient one, which is what I hope I do.

"I don't actually feel that I need God to do that, but I do appreciate the poetry that religion can bring into daily life and the mindfulness of grace that religion can bring. Otherwise you can get into a materialistic routine where you never notice the specialness of a loaf of fresh bread, whereas in Jewish tradition you bless the bread and that makes you mindful of it. And you bless the wine before you guzzle it down!

"In our modern secular life we need to somehow fill the hole that is left when you take religion out of it."

Her next novel is about a Hebrew manuscript from 14th-century Spain, which still exists even though it was nearly destroyed first during the Inquisition, and then in the Holocaust. "It was saved twice - by Muslims," Brooks says.