Year of Wonders: A Novel of the Plague

Year of Wonders: A Novel of the Plague
Type	book
Publication date	2001
Author(s)	Geraldine Brooks
Subjects	plague,  “pandemic”,  “social distancing”
Several of the ideas promoted in the books, especially around non-medical interventions such as lockdowns and social distancing, might have been used as idealized templates for the Covid narrative in 2020.

Year of Wonders: A Novel of the Plague is a 2001 international bestselling historical fiction novel by Geraldine Brooks about a village "that sacrificed itself for the health of a nation". It was chosen as both a New York Times and Washington Post Notable Book. Several of the ideas promoted in the books, especially around non-medical interventions such as lockdowns and social distancing, might have been used as idealized templates for the Covid narrative in 2020.

Author

Geraldine Brooks is an Australian-American journalist and writer. After her studies at Sydney University and her first professional experience as a reporter for the Sydney Morning Herald, she worked as a foreign correspondent for the Wall Street Journal from 1983 to the mid-1990s, covering crises in Africa, the Balkans, and the Middle East. She won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2006 for her novel March.

Plot summary

The novel opens in the spring of 1665 when a young widow Anna Frith, takes on a tailor, George Remington Viccars as a boarder. Shortly after the arrival of a box of fabrics from London, Mr. Viccars develops a high fever, and starts exhibiting symptoms of the bubonic plague. He begs her to burn all he brought with him to stop the spread of disease, but after his death, Mr. Viccars' clients come to claim their work and disregard the warning.

Over the next few weeks, Anna's neighbor (Mr. Viccars' employer), her two young sons, and a few other villagers fall ill with the plague and die. The spate of deaths is blamed on a widow, Mem Gowdie and her niece, Anys Gowdie, the village's herbalists and midwives, who are accused of being witches. Both Mem and Anys are murdered by villagers.

The Rector Mr. Michael Mompellion proposes that the villagers quarantine themselves to avoid spreading the "plague-seeds" beyond the village. Except the Bradfords, the local landed gentry, the whole village agrees.

As the death toll mounts, even the town church is abandoned for the sake of social distancing. "Do not despair!"" says the minister. "For a church is not a building, merely! We shall still have our church, but we will have it in the midst of God’s own creation. We will meet under the ceiling of Heaven." The fields become the place of worship, where the parishioners keep due distance from each other.

People selling fake cures and charms are duly punished by the villagers, tossing one into a manure pit.

In the epilogue, Anna Frith briefly narrates the three years since she left Eyam. Her flight from the Bradford's wrath leads her to board the next ship leaving the port of Plymouth, taking her and the child to Oran. Upon her arrival, she seeks out a Muslim doctor, having found physick and midwifery to be her vocation. He agrees to take her in, due to his despair at sex segregation in Islam keeping women and their husbands from seeking his aid during medical emergencies and labour. To satisfy the customs of the Al-Andalus Arabs, he takes her as one of his wives in name only so that she may continue her study and work with him freely. The book closes with her taking her two daughters by the hand before going into the city – the Bradford child, who is now named A'isha, for the sustenance she gave Anna during their sea voyage to Oran, and her birth daughter, conceived with Michael Mompellion, whom she has named Elinor.

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