Book Review - The Secret Chord

By Brother Marc

This summer I read The Secret Chord by Geraldine Brooks, a 2015 New York Times bestseller. She won the 2005 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for her novel March, the story of a family man (the father in Louisa May Alcott’s novel Little Women) caught up in the terrors and mass destruction of the Civil War. 

The Secret Chord paints a fresh portrait of the Biblical figure David as a gifted artist, dedicated visionary, charismatic outlaw, and warrior king. He was a vainglorious alpha male—ruthless when necessary—with great passions and deadly flaws. He struggled with conflicting emotions as husband and father yet was able to deeply repent of his moral transgressions. 

The novel takes place around 1000 BCE. It dramatizes the conflict of right and wrong amid the unending brutality of war and political survival. It tackles the tensions between reason and romance, religion and politics, and creativity and survival. We can feel and understand the excitement, beauty, tenderness, and devotion in David’s life. We cringe at the conflicts and horrors Brooks describes so vividly.

She used as the narrator David’s life-long advisor Natan (Nathan), whose benevolent and well-grounded opinions were often enhanced by whirlwind prophetic trances. He strove to chronicle the king’s entire life along with the profound loyalties and deadly betrayals David evoked in those around him. He treated with respect the love between David and Jonathan that strained all other bonds. He listened especially to the voices of the voiceless women in David’s circle.

King David is the first character in Western literature whose story is told in detail from early childhood to extreme old age. Surviving historical sources include Second Chronicles, which gives the genealogy of David and his descendants along with his biography. These were written at the end of the fifth century BCE in order to defend the legitimacy of the Davidic monarchy at that time. This in turn underscored the centrality of Jerusalem and its Temple for the Jewish nation. (Jesus’ ancestry is listed in a similar style in Matthew’s Gospel and includes David.)

Today David is known by many only as the youthful slayer of the enemy giant Goliath and for the rotten way he made Bathsheba his wife. Michelangelo’s magnificent and stunning statue of David, seventeen feet tall, stands in Florence. Yet, his greatest legacy is his Psalms. 

At least 73 of the 150 psalms in the Biblical Psalter are David’s, written in Hebrew. They overflow with history, myth, poetry, wisdom, and prayer. When I reflect on all the grief, sorrow, loneliness, exultation, praise, and thanksgiving found in them, I still wonder at how the David described in history and in The Secret Chord produced such masterpieces. Through them the secret chord of his relationship with God has sounded for three thousand years.

He describes his trust in God with such emotional intensity and sensitivity that it still resonates with us today. “Wake up, my soul! Awake, harp and lyre! I will awake the dawn!” “Let the groans of prisoners reach you…,” and the whole 23rd Psalm “The Lord is my Shepherd…” often recited at funerals and in dark times. 

Even individual verses from a psalm can evoke deeper religious feeling and devotion: for example, “I have kept my soul peaceful, like an infant in its mother’s arms.”

Psalms have always been and continue to be used in the Jewish and Christian worlds as song, prayer, meditation, blessing, or simply reminders to be attentive to the moment. Christian monastics have long recited the full Psalter continually year-round. At New Skete we have also expanded the traditional selections used for the daily liturgical services. 

Begin to study a psalm and you begin to probe into a vast world of manuscripts, archeological discoveries like the Dead Sea Scrolls, ancient languages, and translations like the Greek Septuagint. Very quickly, a vast tradition of commentaries will come to your rescue. 

I am glad I picked up The Secret Chord at a local bookstore. I enjoyed its magical, vivid, and stark retelling of an ancient story. But I am still ever more drawn to the living joys and sorrows, mysteries, and insights I find in David’s Psalms themselves.