.. a choice we made at the beginning, to choose death rather than slavery.'

In this novel, Alice Hoffman attempts a retelling of the Jewish resistance at Masada during the Roman siege during the first century CE. I've since read that the only account we have of this event is `The Jewish War' written around 75 CE by Flavius Josephus, a Jewish historian who became a Roman citizen. Masada, according to Josephus, was fortified by Herod the Great (between 37 and 31 BCE) as a refuge for himself in case of a revolt. The historical context, as I understand it, can be summarised as follows: in 66 CE, at the beginning of the first Jewish Revolt against the Roman Empire, a group of Jewish extremists known as the Sicarii (a subset of the Zealots) overcame the Roman garrison at Masada, and settled there. Three years later, after the Siege of Jerusalem and the subsequent destruction of the Second Temple, other members of the Sicarii as well as other Jewish families fled from Jerusalem and settled at Masada.

`We were a city and a world unto ourselves, with more people arriving all the time.'

The account of the siege of Masada was supposedly related to Josephus by two women who had hidden inside a cistern together with five children, thus avoiding the mass suicide that supposedly ended the siege.

`.. some days were meant to remember that the past was with us still.'

`The Dovekeepers' tells the story of the siege through the interactions of six different women: Shirah, the Witch of Moab, and her two daughters Aziza and Nahara; Yael, the daughter of a political assassin; Revka, whose husband has been killed by the Romans and whose daughter has been brutalised by them; and Channa, the reclusive wife of the leader of the Jewish rebels. Shirah, Aziza, Nahara, Yael and Revka are the dove keepers: tending Masada's dovecotes.

The novel has four main sections, narrated by Yael, Revka, Shirah and Aziza who each describe their lives before arriving at Masada. While these four stories are diverse, the voices seem remarkably similar. This may have been intended (given that the story is being related by a survivor) but it sometimes hampered my reading of the story. At times, too, I felt that the events being recounted were overwhelmed by the language used to describe them. As a consequence, some of the actions taken seemed contrived.

This is not a fast read: it takes time to make sense of the four individual narratives, to appreciate how they come together to provide the setting for the ending of the siege. Life at Masada, surviving precariously in the close quarters of a fortress, must have been difficult. Internal dissent and the difficulties of growing their own crops (with fertilizer provided from the dovecotes) were frequently as much of a challenge as Roman attack.

And the end? The story recounted by the survivors is horrific. I did not particularly enjoy this novel but it made me curious about the events surrounding the siege of Masada.

`A story can be many things to many people.'

Jennifer Cameron-Smith