The Poisonwood Bible - Barbara Kingsolver (HarperCollins 1998)

History holds all things in the balance, including large hopes and short lives.

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Set about 70 years after Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, this excellent novel also explores the disasters and epiphanies of white people in the Congo. The country that an American missionary takes his wife and four daughters to is on the brink of independence although, initially, this little affects the villagers whom he spends his time exhorting to ‘walk forward into the light’. But the story is not really about Nathan Price, a man in whom ‘heaven and anger get mingled together’. It is told in turns by the five female members of his family, all of whom adapt to him and their new home in remote Kilanga province in different ways. Nathan may rule his household with belt and bible, but his only voice is the one allowed him by the female narrators; and their attitudes to him and to each other change like the shadows over the Kwilu river.

The hostility and beauty of the Congolese jungle mirror the betrayals and salvations of this family as it explores ‘the great, shifting terrain between righteousness and what’s right.’ As the lame and mute Adah sees it, ‘The Congo is only a long path that takes you from one hidden place to another.’ There are Conradian touches – the ‘rotted tree stumps’, ‘curtain of forest’ and ‘vines strangling their own kin’ – which accentuate the ominous atmosphere; and, in the opening pages, the mother-narrator invites the reader to ‘decide what sympathy I deserve’ in reference to ‘our family’s…terrible end.’ So a doomed climax hangs over these characters for much of the novel, but the richness and exoticism of Kingsolver’s imagery helps one forget this in between Oleanna Price’s reminders. The varying characters and voices of the daughters, the family’s relentless bafflement at their new setting, the bleakly comic failures of the father to bend the locals and the land to his will – these are skillfully handled and very absorbing. There is even a blaspheming parrot that persecutes the missionary.

The politics of Congolese independence and the turbulent aftermath of this event form a shadowy backdrop to the Prices’ existence. Are Khrushchev and the Communists coming? Is the gunfire heard deep in the forest getting closer? Can Lumumba unite this vast collection of peoples into a single nation? There is a vividly imagined sequence in which white men drink ‘blood-coloured brandy’ in a mahogany-panelled study while determining Congo’s future, and the planks of the panelling remember being forest trees feeling ‘the scales of snake belly on their branches’. Now they have their backs to the wall.

But there is another part to the novel: the piecing together of the Prices after what they have been through in the Congo. The family, and the women in particular, are irreversibly altered by their experiences. They have suffered and lost much, but they have also gained something from their Congolese neighbours – an understanding that ‘there are more words in the world than no and yes.’ And it is clear that each narrator is, in her own way, ‘striving for light’.