Grouch's Full Review: Barbara Kingsolver - The Poisonwood Bible
Politics and religion, those strange bedfellows, snuggle between the sheets in Barbara Kingsolver’s impressive novel The Poisonwood Bible. Set during Africa’s political upheaval in the early 1960s, Kingsolver’s tale follows missionary Nathan Price, his wife and their four daughters into the heart of darkness as he tries to bring the light of Christ to the Dark Continent.
The book is big and beautiful, full of prose that fairly leaps off the page with all its energy. After just one reading, the paperback copy I own is pretty exhausted—worn out from dozens of dog-eared pages and smears of ink where I’ve scribbled highlighted stars in the margins, marking particularly favorite bits of Kingsolver’s language.
It also has a broken spine, a nicked cover and a small tear on the copyright page: all injuries sustained during my intense wrestling matches with this book. Yes, it’s true, I had to pull a couple of WWF moves on The Poisonwood Bible during the course of the two weeks I spent with it. While most of the words melted on my tongue like easy-to-swallow medicine, there were a couple of laborious stretches (mostly in the latter half) which I struggled to make it through.
Knowing very little about the turmoil of Africa’s Congo in 1960, I had a difficult time understanding all the events of the country’s civil war.
[Cliff Note for the history-challenged: After 75 years of colonial rule, Belgium declared the nation independent in 1960, leaving it to its own fate. Civil unrest followed and, later that year, Premiere Patrice Lumumba was overthrown (and allegedly killed) by Joseph Mobutu, a military officer.]
Thankfully, Kingsolver places her emphasis on people rather than politics. The Price family arrives in Africa from Georgia (like a family of Eskimos plopped down in a jungle), smuggling their personal possessions past customs, stuffing things like cake mixes, garden seeds, frying pans, Band-Aids, scissors and Bibles under their clothes. All too soon, however, those material goods come to mean very little when the missionary family is confronted by the harsh, primitive reality of the Congo. The book is filled with tragedy and turmoil—both on the national scale and within the confines of the family itself. No one escapes Africa unscathed.
Kingsolver lets her narrative unfold slowly, told through the eyes of each of the women—mainly the young girls Rachel, Ruth May and the twins Adah and Leah. Their mother, Orleanna, introduces each section with a passage set thirty years after the novel’s main events. Her reflections are lyrical and poignant (A kiss of flesh-colored sunrise while I hung out the wash, a sigh of indigo birds exhaled from the grass), capturing the voice of a woman wearied by a life of disappointment.
But the strength of The Poisonwood Bible belongs to the girls, each with a distinct voice. There’s Rachel, the oldest child at fifteen, who is shallow and self-involved; there’s Leah, the most devout believer in Scripture and her fire-and-brimstone father; there’s Adah, the smartest one in the story, even though everyone thinks she’s mentally handicapped; and there’s Ruth May, the youngest one of the family (five years old when the story opens), who views the world with poignant innocence.
Kingsolver has done a masterful job in making each girl’s voice distinct. In structure, The Poisonwood Bible reminds me of that other masterpiece of narration, As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner. The different voices take on a life of their own throughout the novel’s many pages. Rachel’s passages are peppered with malapropisms and mixed metaphors (It was a tapestry of justice! and I felt like Gulliver among the Lepidopterans). Leah’s sections read, at times, like Biblical tracts. Ruth May speaks in simple, declarative sentences which could have been lifted from a second-grader’s primer.
But it’s Adah who delighted me the most (I think Kingsolver also had the most fun with her sections, too). The “malformed twin” speaks in palindromes (you know, those sentences which read the same forwards and backwards): Eye on sleep peels no eye! and Live was I ere I saw evil. She is the most perceptive and, you come to believe, the one character who will turn out all right after the events of the family’s sojourn through Africa.
Kingsolver knows her characters intimately and creates such vibrant portraits of each (with the exception of Nathan) that we feel we can press our fingers right through the paper and touch their sun-baked flesh. It helps that Kingsolver herself lived briefly in the Congo when she was eight years old in 1963. Her childhood experience seems to have had a lasting effect on her imagination, allowing her to bring this troubled family to life.
Things are amiss for the Prices practically from the start. As Rachel relates: From the very first moment I set foot in the Congo, I could see we were not in charge. We got swept up with those people that took us to the church for all their half-naked dancing and goat meat with the hair still on, and I said to myself: this little trip is going to be the ruin of the Price family as we know it. And, boy, was it ever.
The real trouble here starts at the top, with the head of the household. Nathan Price is a hard-headed zealot determined to bring the Gospel to the unchurched, regardless of the cost to the village or the members of his family. Here is where The Poisonwood Bible most resembles that other “strange family in a strange land” novel, The Mosquito Coast by Paul Theroux. Unlike Theroux’ Allie Fox, however, Nathan remains an enigma since Kingsolver never tells any portion of the story through his voice—this is a woman’s tale through and through. Still, we know enough of Nathan to dislike him and to agonize with his wife and daughters as sorrowful events come at them, unstoppable as one of those cartoon snowballs rolling downhill and gathering everything in its path.
And the events certainly do lead to a tragedy which, surprisingly, takes place not in the final pages, but only two-thirds of the way through the 543 pages. When I reached that point, I wondered how Kingsolver would sustain the pace and retain my interest in what happened to this family. While the remaining pages are certainly well-written, following Orleanna and the girls into the early 1980s, The Poisonwood Bible’s conclusion is not as successful as its bold, beautiful beginning. The post-tragedy portion felt padded and drawn-out. This is where I started to put those WWF chokeholds on the book (or, rather, it put me in a headlock).
Still, there’s the matter of all those dog-eared and highlighted pages in my copy. With its lush language and rich characterization, there’s plenty going for The Poisonwood Bible. Looking back over the novel, I realize it’s one that I deeply admire, especially when I read a paragraph like this (as told by Leah):
It was hot that day, in a season so dry our tongues went to sleep tasting dust and woke up numb. Our favorite swimming holes in the creek, which should have been swirling with fast brown water this time of year, were nothing but dry cradles of white stones. Women had to draw drinking water straight from the river, while they clucked their tongues and told stories of women fallen to crocodiles in other dry years, which were never as dry as this one. The manioc fields were flat: dead. Fruit trees barren. Yellow leaves were falling everywhere, littering the ground like a carpet rolled out for the approaching footsteps of the end of time. The great old kapoks and baobabs that shaded our village ached and groaned in their branches. They seemed more like old people than plants.
Without a doubt, it is Kingsolver’s careful construction of language, with a close eye to resonant details, which made her an easy pick for Oprah’s Book Club in June. The Poisonwood Bible also features a cast of strong women who prevail, with varying degrees of success, through moments of crisis—a major theme running through most of La Oprah’s picks. Hardly “chick lit,” however, Kingsolver’s novel has strong appeal for both genders. It may be flawed with a sagging pace at the very end, but this book is nonetheless the kind of literature I like: full of intellect and emotion and, most of all, prose that sings like a brightly-colored jungle bird.
[This review was written as part of an Oprah Book List Write-Off, organized by amykhar. The other reviewers who each picked an Oprah pick to discuss are taurusmoon, gracef, forkids, thinkerlady, redlass, kristennc, francesca57, frazzledspice, zzjulia, prepoia and erik_kosberg. Please hop on over to their profile pages, or go to this link, http://www.epinions.com/book-Member_Write_Offs-Oprah, to read all about how they got Oprah-fied and lived to tell about it.]
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