Year of Wonders

How do the cycle of the landscape in which “Year of Wonders” is set reflect what happens to the people of the village.
In her 2001 novel, “Year of Wonders’, author Geraldine Brooks presents a collection of leitmotifs that   trial and reveal the cycle the village faced; when the plague arrives at the village, the sequence of life and death, fire and the altering seasons are epitomized in the township. Brooks shows her readers that Anna Frith, the protagonist, encounters hardship through   the death of significant individuals especially her ‘babes’ Jamie and Tom while acknowledging that Anna was a mid-wife and bringing new life into the pandemonium. The reader sees that after the cycle of life and death the town’s individuals use fire as a sign of the termination of adversity from the contagion. The reader acknowledges that the cycle of seasons to comply with the turmoil of the plague with the intention of relating the aspects of nature of the hardship of the plague changing. Brooks demonstrates that for the most part, the cycles of the landscape reflect on the hardship that the villagers go through.
In Eyam, death was a significant influence as half the citizens were buried nearby the rectory. The central character, Anna, had to endure one of the worst scenarios that a mother could possibly face, her two children Tom and Jamie being taken away from her. Half of the families in Eyam came in contact with the plague and were struck down by it. Anna is constantly around the presence of the dead which results in her grieving over many of the people she loved, “sometimes if I walked the main street of the village in the evening, I felt the press of their ghosts”. The harsh realities of the death toll contribute to the grief of losing families and neighbours and also the loss of skilled farmers, the sexton or tradesmen become another burden. The villagers appear cut off from civilization and gradually quarantined from God. The loss of faith becomes more and more...