Rating: ****
Tags: Fiction, General, Family, Americans, Literary, Historical, Family Life, Domestic Fiction, Families, Religious, Americans - Congo (Democratic Republic), Congo (Democratic Republic), Missionaries, Lang:en
Summary
The Poisonwood Bible is a story told by the wife and
four daughters of Nathan Price, a fierce, evangelical Baptist
who takes his family and mission to the Belgian Congo in 1959.
They carry with them everything they believe they will need
from home, but soon find that all of it—from garden seeds
to Scripture—is calamitously transformed on African soil.
What follows is a suspenseful epic of one family's tragic
undoing and remarkable reconstruction over the course of three
decades in postcolonial Africa.
Oprah Book Club® Selection, June 2000: As
any reader of
The Mosquito Coast knows, men who drag their families
to far-off climes in pursuit of an Idea seldom come to any
good, while those familiar with
At Play in the Fields of the Lord or
Kalimantaan understand that the minute a missionary
sets foot on the fictional stage, all hell is about to break
loose. So when Barbara Kingsolver sends missionary Nathan Price
along with his wife and four daughters off to Africa in
The Poisonwood Bible, you can be sure that salvation
is the one thing they're not likely to find. The year is 1959
and the place is the Belgian Congo. Nathan, a Baptist preacher,
has come to spread the Word in a remote village reachable only
by airplane. To say that he and his family are woefully
unprepared would be an understatement: "We came from Bethlehem,
Georgia, bearing Betty Crocker cake mixes into the jungle,"
says Leah, one of Nathan's daughters. But of course it isn't
long before they discover that the tremendous humidity has
rendered the mixes unusable, their clothes are unsuitable, and
they've arrived in the middle of political upheaval as the
Congolese seek to wrest independence from Belgium. In addition
to poisonous snakes, dangerous animals, and the hostility of
the villagers to Nathan's fiery take-no-prisoners brand of
Christianity, there are also rebels in the jungle and the
threat of war in the air. Could things get any worse? In fact they can and they do. The first part of
The Poisonwood Bible revolves around Nathan's
intransigent, bullying personality and his effect on both his
family and the village they have come to. As political
instability grows in the Congo, so does the local witch
doctor's animus toward the Prices, and both seem to converge
with tragic consequences about halfway through the novel. From
that point on, the family is dispersed and the novel follows
each member's fortune across a span of more than 30 years.
The Poisonwood Bible is arguably Barbara Kingsolver's
most ambitious work, and it reveals both her great strengths
and her weaknesses. As Nathan Price's wife and daughters tell
their stories in alternating chapters, Kingsolver does a good
job of differentiating the voices. But at times they can
grate--teenage Rachel's tendency towards precious malapropisms
is particularly annoying (students practice their "French
congregations"; Nathan's refusal to take his family home is a
"tapestry of justice"). More problematic is Kingsolver's
tendency to wear her politics on her sleeve; this is
particularly evident in the second half of the novel, in which
she uses her characters as mouthpieces to explicate the
complicated and tragic history of the Belgian Congo. Despite these weaknesses, Kingsolver's fully realized,
three-dimensional characters make
The Poisonwood Bible compelling, especially in the
first half, when Nathan Price is still at the center of the
action. And in her treatment of Africa and the Africans she is
at her best, exhibiting the acute perception, moral engagement,
and lyrical prose that have made her previous novels so
successful.
--Alix Wilber
In this risky but resoundingly successful novel, Kingsolver
leaves the Southwest, the setting of most of her work (The Bean
Trees; Animal Dreams) and follows an evangelical Baptist
minister's family to the Congo in the late 1950s, entwining
their fate with that of the country during three turbulent
decades. Nathan Price's determination to convert the natives of
the Congo to Christianity is, we gradually discover, both
foolhardy and dangerous, unsanctioned by the church
administration and doomed from the start by Nathan's
self-righteousness. Fanatic and sanctimonious, Nathan is a
domestic monster, too, a physically and emotionally abusive,
misogynistic husband and father. He refuses to understand how
his obsession with river baptism affronts the traditions of the
villagers of Kalinga, and his stubborn concept of religious
rectitude brings misery and destruction to all. Cleverly,
Kingsolver never brings us inside Nathan's head but instead
unfolds the tragic story of the Price family through the
alternating points of view of Orleanna Price and her four
daughters. Cast with her young children into primitive
conditions but trained to be obedient to her husband, Orleanna
is powerless to mitigate their situation. Meanwhile, each of
the four Price daughters reveals herself through first-person
narration, and their rich and clearly differentiated
self-portraits are small triumphs. Rachel, the eldest, is a
self-absorbed teenager who will never outgrow her selfish view
of the world or her tendency to commit hilarious malapropisms.
Twins Leah and Adah are gifted intellectually but are
physically and emotionally separated by Adah's birth injury,
which has rendered her hemiplagic. Leah adores her father;
Adah, who does not speak, is a shrewd observer of his
monumental ego. The musings of five- year-old Ruth May reflect
a child's humorous misunderstanding of the exotic world to
which she has been transported. By revealing the story through
the female victims of Reverend Price's hubris, Kingsolver also
charts their maturation as they confront or evade moral and
existential issues and, at great cost, accrue wisdom in the
crucible of an alien land. It is through their eyes that we
come to experience the life of the villagers in an isolated
community and the particular ways in which American and African
cultures collide. As the girls become acquainted with the
villagers, especially the young teacher Anatole, they begin to
understand the political situation in the Congo: the brutality
of Belgian rule, the nascent nationalism briefly fulfilled in
the election of the short-lived Patrice Lumumba government, and
the secret involvement of the Eisenhower administration in
Lumumba's assassination and the installation of the villainous
dictator Mobutu. In the end, Kingsolver delivers a compelling
family saga, a sobering picture of the horrors of fanatic
fundamentalism and an insightful view of an exploited country
crushed by the heel of colonialism and then ruthlessly
manipulated by a bastion of democracy. The book is also a
marvelous mix of trenchant character portrayal, unflagging
narrative thrust and authoritative background detail. The
disastrous outcome of the forceful imposition of Christian
theology on indigenous natural faith gives the novel its
pervasive irony; but humor is pervasive, too, artfully
integrated into the children's misapprehensions of their world;
and suspense rises inexorably as the Price family's peril and
that of the newly independent country of Zaire intersect.
Kingsolver moves into new moral terrain in this powerful,
convincing and emotionally resonant novel. Agent, Frances
Goldin; BOMC selection; major ad/promo; author tour.
Amazon.com Review
From Publishers Weekly
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.