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With all of palace intrigue, shift­ing alliances, rec­on­cil­i­a­tions, and betray­als, The Secret Chord is also a gen­uine page-turn­er, sus­pense­ful no mat­ter how well one knows the source of this adap­ta­tion. The most haunt­ing of these are the voic­es of women: Bat­she­va, Mikhal, and Avi­gail, among others. Above all, The Secret Chord suc­ceeds as a rich­ly accom­plished char­ac­ter study of all the peo­ple who love, hate, and fear David. The result is a shift­ing, mul­ti­fac­eted tapes­try that cap­tures both the enor­mi­ty of David’s crimes as well as his gen­eros­i­ty and large­ness of heart - embell­ished by a potent line or two from Scrip­ture cun­ning­ly insert­ed here and there, to great effect. Brooks adds intri­cate lay­ers to his some­times melan­choly per­spec­tive, employ­ing the inge­nious (and sly­ly anachro­nis­tic) device of the inter­views he con­ducts with oth­ers, pre­sum­ably at the behest of the king him­self, who wish­es a full and unspar­ing chron­i­cle of his life and king­ship as a lega­cy.

Men­tioned in just a few entic­ing places in Scrip­ture, Natan’s shad­owy pres­ence leaves a great deal to fill in. The entire arc of King David’s career, from shep­herd to Lear-like decrepi­tude, is told through the prophet Natan. In her lat­est book, Pulitzer Prize win­ner Geral­dine Brooks sets her­self the daunt­ing chal­lenge of por­tray­ing one of the most hero­ic yet moral­ly trou­bling fig­ures in the entire cor­pus of Jew­ish lit­er­a­ture - and indeed world lit­er­a­ture as a whole.