Book review: Geraldine Brooks brilliantly portrays the biblical King David as an all-too-human mix of sacred and profane

If the Second Iron Age was going to yield its desiccated secrets to any 21st century novelist, then who better than Geraldine Brooks? The US-based, Australian-born foreign correspondent turned author has long been feted for her ability to animate the forgotten corners of history in such bestselling novels as Year of Wonders, People of the Book, Caleb's Crossing and, not least, her Pulitzer Prize-winning novel from 2005, March. But raking over the bones of the biblical King David, a figure hallowed by Jews, Christians and Muslims, as she does in her fifth novel, The Secret Chord, is as ambitious and risky an undertaking as can be imagined.

As Brooks herself declares at the novel's outset, this is a far cry from the gilded, sanitised story of David told in Sunday schools and synagogues. But while its vivid accounts of violence and lust may tax conventional beliefs and mores, it succeeds in reinvigorating this time-worn tale of the young shepherd who slays a giant and fulfils a prophecy by becoming the second king of Israel. It also sifts through the silt of history and myth to give voice to others whose names or deeds are inscribed in ancient texts, yet who remain, at best, shadows.

Narrated by Natan the prophet, who is an old man recalling his years in the service of King David and his travails in writing the king's story - one that now lies complete in scrolls tied and sealed by his own hand in his home, which lies "across the wadi" from Har Moriah, as the Temple Mount is called in Hebrew, and from where he can hear workmen noisily constructing the temple that neither he nor David will live to see.

He had been charged with this task by David, when David was in his 50th year, and when age had "brought only distinction to a beauty that had proved irresistible to men and women alike". After risking the king's ire in insisting he set down his story in all its light and dark, not as just "a safe tale, fit for the ears of the young", Natan had won approval to talk to the people in David's early life in order to set down a true account. Memories of these encounters, together with those of battles and bloody slayings, unspool onto the page with such graphic immediacy and power that even as you recoil, you cannot stop reading.

For Brooks, in the guise of her elderly narrator, has complete mastery of this story of a man "who dwelt in the searing glance of the divine, but who sweated and stank, rutted without restraint, butchered the innocent, betrayed those most loyal to him …" A man who also "built a nation, made music that pleased heaven, and left poems in our mouths that will be spoken by people yet unborn".