COLETTE'S LIST

Brief Reviews Writ Loud

by Colette Bancroft

Kingsolver: Power And Its Price

IT IS 1959, something like an age of innocence, when the Price family sets out from Bethlehem, Georgia, as missionaries to the Congo. For the flight across the Atlantic, Orleanna Price and her four young daughters wear layers upon layers of clothing, and under it they have strapped on all the necessities that will not fit into their luggage -- hatchets and pinking shears, aspirin and skillets, Betty Crocker cake mixes and cans of Underwood deviled ham. Swaddled in those trappings of civilization, they dutifully head for the village of Kilanga in the wake of Nathan Price, who bears no such mundane burdens. As his daughter Leah observes, "My father, of course, was bringing the Word of God -- which fortunately weighs nothing at all."

The Price family's journey into Africa -- none of them ever truly comes out of it -- is the subject of Barbara Kingsolver's moving and masterful new novel The Poisonwood Bible. From the publication of her first novel, The Bean Trees, in 1988, Kingsolver has deftly embodied political and moral concerns in her engaging characters and well-crafted storytelling. Like Dickens and Steinbeck, she tells stories for a reason and tells them well, and in The Poisonwood Bible she does so better than ever.

The novel is narrated in turns by Orleanna and her daughters, their voices and versions of life in Kilanga weaving together to form the whole.

Orleanna married her charismatic husband when she was little more than a wild girl herself, a small-town motherless child swept away by the handsome young preacher. She pops out four babies almost before she can catch her breath, adapting with grace to the poverty and rootlessness of her life as a preacher's wife. They are skills that serve her well in Kilanga, where she discovers with stunning speed just how wide and deep her family's ignorance of the Congo is, how complex and rich and dangerous and utterly different a world they have dropped into.

Her daughters find their own ways of coping. Rachel, the oldest, wears her self-absorption like armor, fretting about fashion and bad hair days amid malaria and starvation. Despite her determined shallowness and her malapropisms -- she declares Kilanga the "sloop of despair" -- Rachel is a sharp observer of the relationship between her parents, the first to register her father's cruelty to her mother and to hold him in contempt for it.

Leah is for a long time Nathan's most devoted disciple. Gifted and courageous, she leads the way in engaging the people around her, learning to communicate with the villagers and to understand them -- which puts her at odds with her father's methods. When she does break with him, she attaches herself to Africa with an even fiercer passion.

Her twin sister, Adah, is as cool and reserved as Leah is emotional. Physically handicapped by a birth defect, she has chosen to remain almost mute even though she is brilliant and obsessed with language and poetry, shaping her story with anagrams and lines from Dickinson, absorbing the subtleties of the Kikongo language. Ruth May, the baby, still has the fearlessness of a well-loved child and the adaptability of the very young. Nosy as a monkey, she is the purveyor of secrets: "I was the youngest, but I had something to tell."

Kingsolver gives each of them a distinctive voice, and their stories are by turns comic, suspenseful and heartbreaking. The one voice we do not hear is Nathan Price's. Like Kurtz before him, he makes the journey into the heart of darkness and leaves others to return and report. Kurtz, of course, left his fragile fiancee at home, far from that unknown world. Nathan leads his wife and daughters right into it, sure that his Jesus will protect them, though he would never have imagined how each of them would find redemption.

Kingsolver places the Prices' story firmly in its historical, geographical and political context. Botany and biology, languages and economics are meticulously researched but flow naturally from the story. In one frightening chapter, driver ants swarm into the village like a biblical plague, devouring everything and forcing the people to flee in the middle of the night, choosing in an instant what to save, because they can save only what they can carry to the river. When the Prices return, in their chicken coop they find only the polished bones of the birds.

Power and its consequences, in every arena from imperialism to the family, are a theme throughout the novel. The election and assassination of the Congolese leader Patrice Lumumba, whose death was orchestrated by the United States, lace through the novel as rumor and myth and hard cold danger.

Like Kingsolver's earlier novels, though, The Poisonwood Bible is perhaps above all about parents and children. They find and lose and love one another in ways that resonate across the wide world and shape the most intimate moments. In The Poisonwood Bible, Kingsolver observes those relationships not with sentimentality but with compassion and wisdom.

The Earlier Novels

The Bean Trees (1988): Set in Tucson, Arizona, Kingsolver's home for many years, this novel is the story of Taylor Greer, an adventurous young woman from Kentucky, and her accidental daughter, Turtle. Funny and touching, it establishes Kingsolver's recurring themes of family -- Taylor literally makes a family of strangers -- and social justice, in this case the Sanctuary movement.

Animal Dreams (1990): Codi Noline has stopped dreaming. Stuck in a pointless life, aching with the absence of her beloved sister, who has gone to work in Nicaragua during its civil war, unsure even of who she is, Codi goes home to the tiny town of Grace, Arizona, where her father is probably dying. In this novel, Kingsolver captures beautifully the unique landscape and cultures of the Southwest.

Pigs in Heaven (1993): Kingsolver's first best-seller is a sequel to The Bean Trees in which a six-year-old saves a man's life and nearly tears her family apart. Taylor and Turtle's unusual alliance -- someone abandoned the abused infant Turtle in Taylor's car when she stopped briefly on a Cherokee reservation, and Taylor kept her -- becomes the source of a legal battle over tribal rights and an exploration of the exploitation of Native Americans. Taylor and her own mother, Alice, find surprising resources to keep the family together.

Colette's Archive

Colette's List 1: Hiaasen: Murder Under The Palms

Colette's List 2: Hall, MacDonald & More Murder

Colette's List 3: Crews: The Artist As Scar Lover

Colette's List 4: Mosley: Easy In The City Of Angels

Colette's List 5: Chandler: Trouble Is My Business

Colette's List 6: Mango, Mortal Sin & Margaritaville

Colette's List 7: A Monstrous Regiment of Women

Colette's List 8: The Inferno: James Ellroy's L.A.

Colette's List 9: Spenser Is Parker, Only Taller

Colette's List 10: Tony Hillerman: The Navajo Way

Colette's List 11: Small Towns, Mean Streets

Colette's List 12: James Lee Burke: Blood On The Bayou

Colette's List 13: Rick Harsch: Rust Belt Noir

Colette's List 14: Harrison: A Novel Worth Waiting For

Colette Bancroft, a writer known at various times in her career to date as The Goddess of the Classroom, The Empress of Haute Cuisine and The Spitball Queen, is at work on a mystery novel of her own. She is an editor on the Metro Desk at the St. Petersburg Times.

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