Queenmaker

Book Review: Queenmaker

Queenmaker: A Novel of King David's Queen

by India Edghill (St. Martin's Press, 2002)

a review by Barbara Kellam-Scott [2-19-02]

Many of us who read and study the Bible mourn the low levels of Bible literacy that we see around us. We wish for almost any means to raise those levels. Of course, like most good things, this desire has its pitfalls. For one, when you address an audience of Bible readers, you can't as easily tell them what the Bible says. On this basis, I would guess India Edghill is not among the hopers for greater Bible literacy. If anyone were to read the biblical accounts of the first three kings of Israel side by side with Edghill's novel told in the voice of Michal as daughter of the first king, (PG-13) sex slave of the second, and "mother of the heart" to the third, they could hardly avoid being thoroughly confused.

Some reviewers or blurbers have compared Edghill's work to The Red Tent, the midrash by Anita Diamant on Dinah bat Jacob that women's book clubs made into a blockbuster over the last couple of years. To my eye, there is absolutely no comparison. Diamant "exegeted the silence" of women's culture in the early history of the people who would become Israel, a history that was unchronicled in its own time other than in the very kinds of stories that Dinah tells in the novel. Edghill, on the other hand, at best ignores women's culture in favor of distorting or even reversing the purposeful and familiar chronicle of these three kings. King Saul's wife Ahinoam is never even named and never appears in more than an offhand, third-person reference. Queen Michal is almost completely isolated in David's palace, especially before she befriends Bathsheba (and brings her, if unwittingly, under David's eye). Most of David's other wives go unnamed, and none of them are fleshed out as characters.

Diamant's book gave the women of the Bible narrative real strength, agency, and a power that was both different from the power of men and thoroughly plausible within the narrative as we have it. None of the characters is inconsistent between the Bible and Diamant's imagination. By contrast, although Edghill makes Michal the most powerful woman in David's court, her power is learned from the men around her, every one of them a poor example. Her power is learned haphazardly and in large part ineffectually while the Queen prostitutes herself to the king, secure in her barrenness and its frustration to David's dynastic hopes. Edghill falls into such contortions as asserting that David wants a son from Saul's daughter to cement his dynastic claim, then having David (or his men) purposefully cripple Meribaal, Saul's grandson by Jonathan, in both body and mind and kill off the other five sons and grandsons of Saul as traitors. The powerful witness of Rizpah, the mother of two of those sons, as recounted in 2Samuel 21, which turns David's heart, is omitted. Instead, Edghill has David weeping into Michal's hair and hands in feigned regret that he had to wipe out all possible dynastic competitors.

Edghill seems not to be aware that the books of Samuel were written to support Solomon's dynastic legitimacy. She uses her novel to demonstrate King David's total venality and Solomon's perfection, "a prince always, but never proud; wise, but never arrogant; pious, but never priestly." She seems not to have read such passages as Solomon's dream recorded in 1Kings 3, for she asserts, "Solomon never spoke for Yahweh, as David so often did." And by the way, Solomon is the first-born son of David's liaison with Bathsheba. In Edghill's Israel, no baby dies under Yahweh's curse. David is deprived of his prostrate demonstration of penitence in hopes of appeasing Yahweh.

Most strikingly, in Edghill's novel, God is nearly absent other than as a passive pawn of palace politics. The prophet Samuel is almost as distasteful as King David, and Nathan is merely ineffectual. In his one big moment, when Nathan stands before David in his court to make the "You are the man" speech, David remains cool and even patronizing, so that the prophet is forced to say later that Yahweh softened toward the king. The Ark of the Covenant is a mere object, lost in some dim memory, recovered from unspecified places, and delivered by David into Jerusalem, not in an ecstatic dance of joy, but in a coldly calculated display of the king's virility and piety in one. When the temple is proposed, it is at Michal's suggestion to pacify priests who might back the wrong prince as heir, and Edghill holds off making it clear that David did not build the temple.

Yes, most of the examples I have given are about the men in the story. I do not understand myself who is the "Queenmaker" or why Edghill used that title. There is plenty of silence about Michal in the Bible, but what information is there seems plausible, given what else we know of the times and the characters involved. If, on the other hand, Michal was the one who made Solomon king, as Edghill would have us believe, what could be the motivation of Solomon's own chroniclers to write his "mother of the heart" so nearly out of the story, especially Solomon's part of the story? Perhaps what is most offensive in this book to the wish for Bible literacy is that each of the 30 chapters bears as epigram a verse or bit of a verse, flying through 1Samuel, then marching at times a verse per chapter through 2Samuel. Then there are a couple of lines from 1Chronicles, and then a couple from 1Kings before returning to Samuel. This seems a little too obvious an attempt to give the impression that the novel follows and retells the Bible story with no more than interpretation, and it is a false impression. As is so often the case when only snippets of the Bible record are included, whole narratives are omitted or even reversed to suit the novelist's whim. And the reader, unless s/he has read the full narrative for her/imself, has no basis on which to judge the impression.

In one of only a couple of backtracks is this misleading, for a chapter about David luring Michal into accepting the queen's crown, Edghill's epigram "Behold, the king hath delight in thee . . . ." is from 1Samuel 18:22, what Saul told his servants to tell David so that he would accept betrothal to Michal "as a snare." That preceding verse comes up 17 chapters later, when Michal does set in to snare the aging and ailing David into giving the throne to Solomon.

Queenmaker is a pleasant and easy enough read if you're not looking to raise your own Bible literacy, and probably much more pleasant if you aren't already familiar with the biblical narratives it encompasses. The language is a little bit King James, but in this one characteristic not too far behind The Red Tent. To this advocate for Bible literacy, however, the very ease with which this novel could be taken in and mistaken for the canonical chronicle is the greatest danger it presents. This is a parody of the biblical narrative, and for no particular gain.