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 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