King David Is a Lover, a Fighter, and a Human Being in The Secret Chord

Brooks’ primary contribution to our understanding of King David, then, is less the plot itself than the thematically, chronologically, and psychologically cohesive structure she imposes. Along the way, she lays bare the emotional world not just of the harp-playing psalmist king, but also of secondary characters such as Avigail, Mikhal, and Batsheva, three of David’s wives.
The Secret Chord shows us the many faces of David: the ruddy shepherd boy secretly anointed king, the giant-slayer who marries the incumbent monarch’s daughter and becomes a beloved fighter, the outlaw fleeing the king’s wrath, the crowned head of a newly united kingdom who dances before the ark of God and whose wayward sons unleash a new round of royal intrigue.
In so doing, Brooks, who won the 2006 Pulitzer Prize for March, a historical novel about the absent father of Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women, makes explicit the duality of David’s character as both warrior and poet.
The sweet singer of Israel. So the people called him, long before he was king. I had heard that singer’s voice fill a hall, and bring tears to the cheeks of seasoned warriors. But I had heard it also on the battlefield, fierce and wild, carrying over the clash of arms and the cries of the dying.
The speaker here is the prophet Natan, typically rendered in English as Nathan, whose selection as narrator is one of the most significant authorial choices Brooks makes. Though she does not invent his character, she greatly expands the role he’s given in the biblical narrative, which he joins not as a fully formed prophet popping up in the midst of the story, as in the Bible, but as a boy who joins David’s band while the giant-slayer is an outlaw on the run from King Saul.
This enhanced backstory is just one way Brooks succeeds in transforming Natan from an impersonal conveyor of divine messages to a figure who comes across as a real person, a restrained and respected adviser periodically beset by visions. Brooks plays against stereotype here. Rather than making Natan an omniscient narrator who knows all simply because he’s a seer, the Australian-born author and journalist makes us see Natan as a person, constantly aware that others both fear him and mistakenly assume his direct line to God covers even the mundane goings-on of the palace passages. Natan resolves this difficulty by getting the castle gossip from his slave.
“I have found that the common people, and even, on occasion, those who should know better, such as the king, nurse strange ideas about me,” Natan tells us. “They do not understand that I am given to see only those matters that roil the heavens. They expect me to know everything.”
Turning Natan into a more developed character also provides a more human context for what it might have felt like to be a vessel for conveyance of the divine will. Much as migraine sufferers talk of physical sensations like blurry vision or nausea that warn them of an impending attack, Natan recounts for us the symptoms of imminent prophecy:
The candle guttered and I did not trouble to light another. My body ached from fatigue but my mind was restless. And then my boon companions, gut spasms and pounding head, arrived to join me in my vigil. For once, I welcomed them, these precursors of vision.
Although Brooks delivers a more three-dimensional Natan than does the Bible, her decision to use him as the narrator, and the author of what are essentially David’s memoirs, does have roots in the Talmud. That collection of ancient rabbinical texts credits Natan and another seer with writing part of the story of David, picking up where Samuel the prophet left off when he died.
Brooks also uses another extra-biblical story as the foundation of a major element of David’s biography: the convoluted story of his conception, which, as midrash, or rabbinical tradition, has it, came about when David’s mother switched places with the servant girl. The girl had been slated that night to share the bed of David’s father, who did not realize he was having sex with his own wife following an extended period of abstention.
This sets the stage for David, seen as a bastard sired by another man, to be depicted as a child pariah hated and scorned by his father and seven older brothers. King Saul, for whom David plays the harp to soothe his madness and under whose watch he becomes the underdog who slew Goliath, becomes something of a father figure. This relationship makes it difficult for David to believe that Saul (referred to in the book as Shaul, in keeping with the Hebrew pronunciation of Sha-OOL) truly seeks his death, and makes it more understandable that David is so distraught over Saul’s death he orders the slaying of the Amalekite messenger who delivers the dead man’s crown to his successor.
This tortured father-son pattern repeats itself in the next generation, with David sparing his voracious sons the rod, perhaps to compensate for his own biological father’s treatment of him. It’s a tactic that ends with his attempt to spare his son the spear even as Absalom is doing his best to usurp the throne.
Brooks’ version of the David story doesn’t always run exactly parallel to the traditional one—for instance, she upgrades Jonathan from being David’s beloved but platonic soulmate to being his bedmate as well. Still, she’s commendably content to use the existing adventures as a solid basis for the psychological and narrative scaffolding she so delicately puts into place. The biblical story of David is replete with music, God, love, bloodletting, and the machinations of presumptuous and rapacious princes. Geraldine Brooks knows a good story when she sees it, and in The Secret Chord, she offers a compelling new look at this age-old saga of passion and power.
Shop All New Releases