Rewriting the good book | Fiction

Rewriting the good book

Here's a little fantasy for fledgling writers. Your first novel comes out and receives virtually no coverage in the mainstream press. Despite the wider world's neglect, it does respectably well, but respectability is not enough for your publishers, who know that it costs more to keep an under-performing title in an expensive warehouse than it does to pulp it. Regretfully, they decide it's headed for the shredder. Heartbroken, you persuade them to try one last marketing gambit, and you pass along a mailing list that you think might help generate some interest.

A year or so later, things are looking up: sales are rising, and the book is starting to gain favour with independent booksellers. That mailing list - a collection of liberal Rabbis - has recommended your work to its congregations, and they have recommended it in turn to their reading groups. Five years later, you have sold 1.7 million copies of your novel, it has been reprinted 22 times, it has hit the top 10 bestseller lists - and stayed there - and the film rights have been optioned. Oh, and Julia Roberts has chosen it as a "book that changed my life" in Oprah Winfrey's influential O magazine.

The novel in question is The Red Tent , and its modest but highly delighted author is Anita Diamant, an experienced American journalist who has also written several non-fiction guides to contemporary Jewish life. Not that she ever thought it deserved the pulper: "I really believed there was a market for it," she says, "but I just wanted to keep it in print long enough for it to find its audience." First appearances might suggest that any audience would be rather specialised, because the book is a fictional recreation of a highly elliptical passage in Chapter 34 of the Book of Genesis, but Diamant insists - quite truthfully - that no esoteric knowledge is required, and that "the whole point is that you should be able to read the book without knowing a thing". No Biblical scholar herself, she admits to a largely secular upbringing and a lifetime of "remedial" brushing up.

Diamant's heroine is Dinah, the daughter of Jacob and Leah, who never speaks in Genesis, but whose fate is commonly referred to as "the rape of Dinah". Creating a life for her that stayed broadly within the limited information offered by the Bible led Diamant to question the validity of the term "rape", pointing out that that interpretation rests on one highly contentious word, and that alternative readings are equally, if not more plausible. In her novel, Dinah's relationship with the prince Shalem is recast as a love story, and the brutal massacre that ensues when two of her brothers avenge her honour is seen as motivated by little more than jealousy and greed.

Although some of her more orthodox detractors have condemned her extemporising as sacrilegious - even telling her, she laughs disbelievingly, that "it makes the Jews look bad" - Diamant argues that such imaginative wrestling with Biblical texts falls well within the limits of what is not only sanctioned, but encouraged. At the heart of her defence is the Jewish concept of "midrash", a kind of creative, interactive reading that attempts to explore the Bible's mysteries and lacunae.

"You are supposed to bring every element of your intellect, your emotions, and your imagination to this sort of study," she says, because the Bible is by its nature incomplete and, on occasion, contradictory. "It's up to us to figure out what it means, it's incumbent upon us to make sense of it - it's not a hands-off experience, and that's where I come from, in terms of giving me permission to do whatever the hell I want."

Midrash aside, what has undoubtedly recommended The Red Tent to its legions of readers - many of them networks of women who have set up special groups in order to share their enjoyment of it with one another - is its portrayal of the bonds between its female characters. Dinah's relationship with her mother and her three aunts is at the novel's heart and gives it its name: the red tent is where they gather once a month during menstruation, where they exchange stories and histories and pass on the secrets of love-making, herbal medicine and, most importantly, midwifery. The imaginative challenge of inventing their conversations and their daily life was what most fascinated Diamant.

But far from being a saccharine tale of female togetherness, The Red Tent also explores the bonds that break, including the keen sexual rivalry that Leah and her sisters experience over their shared husband, Jacob. One of the hardest aspects of writing the book, Diamant says, was to "try to set aside our revulsion at polygamy" and to conjure a community that pre-dated the Ten Commandments and was not even, at this point, monotheistic. Consequently, there is no straightforward "happy-ever-after" ending, and the numerous, visceral descriptions of primitive child-bearing are truly terrifying.

Phlegmatic about her material success - she says only that "now my daughter can go to college wherever she likes" - Diamant has since published a second novel, Good Harbor , and is at work on a third. Neither treads the same ground as The Red Tent , and a small portion of her fans have taken exception to her change of direction, although she thinks "they're beginning to forgive me for switching". It's a small price to pay for a writer with an otherwise devoted readership. "I've been love-bombed a lot by my readers," says Diamant, laughing. "I feel very well taken care of by them."

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