The Secret Chord, by Geraldine Brooks - book review: This David is ecstatic, visceral and virile

The Secret Chord is a hybrid between fiction and exegesis

King David is the Hebrew Bible's central figure: the shepherd boy who slew the giant Goliath and became the unifier of the 12 tribes, the dynast who initiated millennia of messianic expectation. David's charisma never dies. From Abraham Cowley's epic Davideis (1656) to Stefan Heym's satiric The King David Report (1972), written in the style of a Stasi report, and Robert Pinsky's novelistic biography, The Life of David (2005), poets and novelists have rewoven his story as a parable for their own times.

Pulitzer prize-winner Geraldine Brooks traces the idea for a novel about David's life to 2006, when her eight-year-old son “made the unusual decision to learn the harp, which started me reflecting on that other long-ago boy harpist.” The Secret Chord is a work of passionate reinterpretation. In the Books of Samuel, David is God's anointed, warlord, minstrel, sensualist, trickster, covenanted friend. Brooks tells his story through the prophet and scribe, Natan, who interviews witnesses of David's life with a view to bequeathing to posterity a full record: “Not just the deeds. The man.”

The man is, of course, unknowable. Iron Age paragon of maleness in a warrior society, David's about as knowable as Ajax. Brooks's descriptions of battle resemble war-artists' depictions. Natan plunges his blade into an enemy: “the warm wetness of his insides closing about my fist… intimate as a rape”. Christianity sees the king as prefiguring Christ the shepherd, the “Second David”. Brooks's David, ecstatic, virile and visceral, seeks to portray the tarnished original.

The episodic structure of The Secret Chord, as Natan solicits divergent testimonies and reports his own experience, makes for a certain slackness of narrative tension. As a scribe, Natan represents the authorial quest for a larger truth than Scripture affords. Bible women, muted and sidelined by their culture, are given voices. The folkloric story of David and Goliath is demystified – the giant originating in a very tall Philistine. Brooks reads the love of David and Yonatan as homosexual rather than homosocial, “surpassing the love of women”, and has the bisexual hero sodomise his first wife, Mikhal, Yonatan's sister. For Shammah, David's brother, the boy was “that worthless little turd”; for Mikhal, the youth was an adored husband she comes to despise: “Exposing himself before the slave girls of his subjects like a whore.” The biblical story of David arouses readers through its laconic brevity; The Secret Chord is a work hybrid between fiction and exegesis, which sends us back to the original, our curiosity quickened.

Little, Brown £16.99. Order for £14.99 (free p&p) from the Independent Bookshop: 08430 600 030