“But the thing that David had done displeased the Lord.” 2 Samuel, 11:27
Elizabeth Cook writes beautiful and complicated prose, befitting of the subjects she chooses. Lux, her sophomore novel, reshapes the Old Testament story of David and Bathsheba into a moving meditation on human failings and acts of atonement. Informed by the Judeo-Christian spiritual tradition without being subject to it, here is the rare book that functions on multiple levels, inspiring new ideas and insights with each re-reading.
While everyone has heard the story of how David beat Goliath, the young shepherd boy defeating the giant with just a stone and sling, Cook asks us to consider the mature King as a man who summons the wife of one of his soldiers to his bed and, when she becomes pregnant, hatches a plan to trick her husband into believing the child is his. The plan fails and David, rather than be exposed, sends Uriah the Hittite back to the front lines carrying orders that he be killed. When she learns her husband is dead, Bathsheba mourns. David then takes her as one of his wives.
The child, of course, will die. Nathan, YHWH’s prophet, explains this to David. He tells him the parable of the man whose ewe lamb is taken from him and, faced with David’s outrage and inability to grasp subtext, explains its meaning. In Cook’s version. Bathsheba is unaware that her child’s death has been set in motion by YHWH as punishment. She is abandoned while David, full of remorse, leaves the palace. He descends into a cave and remains there for seven days, fasting and meditating, searching for the reason he has so displeased the Lord. It is this attempt at atonement which leads him to examine his life and see the harm he has done to others — many of whom loved and admired him. Out of this period of reconciliation come the seven psalms of confession, also known as the penitential psalms.
Lux arrives on these shores at an interesting time in American culture and politics. Corruption and unethical behavior are on everyone’s minds. The President of the United States is being impeached for abusing the power of the office. Just one of several men, wealthy and powerful, who are being called to account for their misdeeds. In David we see a leader wrestling with his own selfishness and arrogance, showing remorse and trying to correct his course. Imagine what would happen if Trump, Weinstein, Clinton — or anyone on the seemingly endless list of men who have used their positions of privilege for personal gain regardless of the consequences to others — were to reflect on their actions. If they were to admit they were wrong, publicly or privately, and seek to atone. What would such a thing even look like? How would the world react? Our faith in our leaders has been eroded to such a degree that it seems impossible and implausible that they might engage in a moment of introspection. Or that we, the general public, could witness such a thing without cynicism.
“Every boy in the land had been brought up on stories of the King as a child … the most brave, the most honest, the most God-fearing, the most dutiful, the most strong, the most generous. He was also known to be the most musical, the most handsome, the most ingenious. A king, not only by appointment but by nature. His kindness would always exceed desert and any anger he showed would be just. Every child in Israel and Judah knew this, including the boy whom Bathsheba employed to deliver the letter to the King.”
It’s worth pointing out that it would be easy to write a different review, one that focuses entirely on Bathsheba, who sits at the opposite end of this power dynamic. Cook gives her a point of view but doesn’t pretend this is a woman with agency. We first meet Bathsheba as a small girl, caught in an angry mob that has gathered to take part in the public stoning of a woman named Miriam. It is the kind of memory that sticks fast. It is the fate Bathsheba only narrowly escapes. The most powerful chapters of Lux are those spent with women. Bathsheba is surrounded by, but still separate from, the King’s other wives who help her care for her dying child. They are kind. Even the prophet Nathan is gentle and comforting when he visits her. She is not the one who has displeased YHWH, but that doesn’t spare her or her son from suffering the consequences. No one considers the ewe lamb.
Cook’s first novel, Achilles, opened with the meeting between Odysseus and the titular hero in Hades. After they part, Achilles looks back over his life — reflecting on his deeds, relationships, the choices he made and their prophesied outcomes. Then we jump forward almost 3,000 years to the poet John Keats — a very different man but still a man — drawing the line between their shared humanity so tautly that it vibrates. Cook attempts to repeat the same trick in Lux. Both books follow the same structure: 75% Old Testament and 25% percent the poet Thomas Wyatt in Lux, 75% Greek myth and 25% Keats in Achilles. But whereas Achilles is 107 pages, Lux is almost four times as long.
There are moments when all those added words take their toll. The King James Bible tells the same story using just 292 words divided into eight verses. But it’s a desiccated version, the barest recounting of names and deeds, sucked dry of emotion. Cook plucks these hollowed-out characters from Samuel and imbues them with souls. She circles the Bible story of David and Bathsheba, plumbs its depths and breathes life into it, creating the type of mannered, academic leaning novel that the English seem to adore, and which inevitably gets reviewed in the TLS or LRB by some Cambridge Don. It took Cook seventeen years to write Lux and the result is dense and slow. In fairness, this is what author claims she intended. But press down firmly on the cover and the words, regardless of how beautiful they are, will flow out its sides like water from a sponge.
“You could almost touch it: the moment of cessation and alteration. The mind drops down like a bird into a valley where there is a river. It plunges down, whizzing as if to its doom, only to have its fall broken by water, its progress altered, to rise up clean and refreshed. Maybe with a fish in its mouth. David listened to his breath – moments ago it had quickened at the remembrance of his fear – and noticed that place of change, the moment of stillness before the in-breath expired.”
Thomas Wyatt was a poet and satirist in the Tudor court, one of the many men accused of and imprisoned for supposed adultery with Henry’s second queen. He was released after Anne Boleyn’s execution, probably due to his father’s friendship with Cromwell — only to be accused of treason again, years later, imprisoned and released, this time at the intervention of another queen. The through-line this time between the two parts – the two points in history – are the Psalms. Attributed to King David, they were famously translated by Wyatt. And then there is Henry, who sees himself as a “modern” David lured by Anne, his very own Bathsheba. Wyatt has no illusions of the role history has placed him in. He is Uriah the Hittite, the shepherd in the prophet Nathan’s parable whose beloved ewe lamb is taken from him by a more powerful man. He is forced into this role not once but twice.
Henry the VIII better fits the image modern readers hold of a king and ruler. “The King of England so honours the estate of matrimony that he has entered into it for a fifth time. He abhors the sin of adultery. He avoids the charge of it by means of perjury and murder.” Henry is an easy target of private ridicule. But in Wyatt’s chapters, one watches as the poet grows more and more weary. In truth, the King has the power of a god over his subjects — as with his queens. Lux or Lukkes was the name of Wyatt’s falcon. In a poem, written while imprisoned in the Tower of London, Lux represents freedom. It is also the kind of play on words the Tudors and Elizabethans adored. Lux or Lukkes can be interpreted to mean light, luxury, luck or a truly striking lack thereof in Wyatt’s case. As in Uriah’s. And Bathsheba’s. When David is in the cave, he has a moment of epiphany. King Saul, whom YHWH turned away from to shine his light on David, is another one who suffered from the absence or loss of luck.
“Had Saul done as he had done he would not have been allowed to live. Saul got away with nothing. For each small deviation from the will of YHWH Saul suffered and was punished. But David could no longer feel the comfort of his own rightness. He had lost all claim to it. YHWH’s love for him was stronger than anything he could do to earn or shake it off. He must now learn to bear it. He had never lacked certainty. The sureness of aim that had guaranteed his success when the stone flew through the air to embed itself in the giant’s brow, had till this moment been present in all his purposes. His will had not failed him.”
This is a moment of insight, but also of smugness, from a man who doesn’t realize yet that YHWH isn’t done with him. Cook is generous with David, pulling us away as he and Bathsheba bury their child together. We feel he has changed. In the original Bible verses he simply gets up from the ground on which he’s been laying when he learns the child has died, bathes and calls for food. When his servants ask him why he wept and fasted while the child yet lived, but now that the child is dead he rises and eats, David replies, “while the child was yet alive, I fasted and wept: for I said, Who can tell whether God will be gracious to me, that the child may live? But now he is dead, wherefore should I fast? Can I bring him back again?” Somehow, the transactional nature of the original rings more true to our times.
[Published by Scribe US on February 4, 2020, 416 pages, $17.00 paperback]