The Dovekeepers

The American novelist Alice Hoffman writes in a genre that might best be termed “magic feminism”. Women and the supernatural pervade her books and it is a recipe that over the course of 21 novels and three volumes of short stories has won her a voracious readership but not, however, universal critical acclaim. She is taking no chances with her latest book: The Dovekeepers, the work of five years, is an all-out attempt at literary seriousness.

The novel is a retelling of the siege of Masada, the seemingly impregnable rock in the Judaean Desert where Jewish patriots made their last stand against the Romans in AD73. According to the historian Josephus, 960 rebels committed mass suicide rather than fall into Roman hands; only two women and five children survived. It’s a story that has become one of the foundation myths of modern Israel and it certainly gives a novelist on a mission something to work with.

Hoffman’s Masada is home not just to freedom fighters but more importantly to four equally resolute women who tell the story. Their job on the rock-fortress is to look after the colony’s doves but there is nothing cooing about them. Yael is a redhead whose mother died giving birth to her and whose freckles, she claims, signify “specks of my mother’s blood”. She is a mixture of pride and self-loathing whose cross-desert journey to Masada after the firing of Jerusalem involves sex in caves and staring down a leopard. Then there’s Revka whose husband was killed by the Romans and her daughter raped and murdered, the shock of which has left her grandsons dumb. Aziza, meanwhile, is the daughter of a sorceress; she is also an instinctive warrior who chafes against the constraints of womanhood. She’s a bit of a looker too, naturally. The last of the quartet is her mother Shirah, the tattoo-covered caster of spells and covert wife of Masada’s leader. She is a dab hand with amulets and dried snakeskin and can summon the rains at will.

These feisty heroines recount not just their own vivid histories but witness the encircling of the rock by the Romans and the inexorable raising of a siege mound that signals their coming destruction. They are also the means through which Hoffman treats her real themes: love, faith, friendship, the power of silence, the unchanging concerns of women. These are proper, ambitious subjects and she approaches them uncompromisingly and with an admirable fixity of purpose.

However, she also does so in a style that is meant to summon up both the cadences and the mindset of 2,000 years ago. She adopts a locution (all four of the protagonists sound the same) designed to underscore the profundity of her content but which turns everything portentous. What was the name of the desert her women had to traverse? “Emptiness was the name of the desolate land we crossed.” And what was in it? “Rocks so sharp they set our feet to bleeding.” On a softer note, then, what did it feel like to lie with your lover? “I burned when I was beside him.”

Allied to cracker-barrel nuggets of wisdom (“When stench is everywhere, the scent of what is pure is most noticeable of all”) and a pervasive anthropomorphism (everyone is likened to a lion, a hawk, a serpent or a flame tree) and the book becomes as hard to get through as the Dead Sea landscape itself (where, incidentally, the wind assaults the traveller, “leaving its marks like whips”).

Hoffman’s loyal fans will no doubt find this sort of stuff inspiring rather than overblown but then this is a novel that depends more than most on personal taste. The remorselessly repeated mystical images and unleavened intensity of mood are no doubt intended to work like Shirah’s incantations and summon up the endgame that took place at the top of Masada’s cliffs. For some readers the magic will work but less susceptible souls may see instead only smoke and mirrors.

The Dovekeepers, by Alice Hoffman, Simon & Schuster, RRP£16.99, 504 pages