The Poisonwood Bible: A Novel (P.S.)
by Barbara Kingsolver
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Book Summary Information
Author: Barbara KingsolverEdition: Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 2008-06-10
ISBN: 0061577073
Number of pages: 576
Publisher: Harper Perennial Modern Classics
Product features:
- ISBN13: 9780061577079
- Condition: New
- Notes: BRAND NEW FROM PUBLISHER! 100% Satisfaction Guarantee. Tracking provided on most orders. Buy with Confidence! Millions of books sold!
Book Reviews of The Poisonwood Bible: A Novel (P.S.)
Book Review: Ambitious, Stark, Wise, Important, Difficult
Summary: 5 Stars
The ritual of destroying an object in effigy is presumed to be an effective purgative. In the practice of voodoo, dolls are crafted in the likeness of a person and various tortures are carried out on them, with the hope that the person after whom they are modeled might suffer similar pains. During the Iranian revolution likenesses of "Uncle Sam" were burned in effigy with the hope of purging that land of its predominant western influence. It is impossible to read Poisonwood Bible in the current political climate without thinking that Kingsolver is taking a scourge of western civilization and burning it in effigy. And a lot of readers will find great satisfaction in the process.
The novel opens with Nathan Price, Baptist minister, and his family of wife and four girls leaving Georgia, boarding a plane for the Belgian Congo in 1959 where Price is to serve as a minister. The destination is a remote small town, Kilanga, accessible only by small plane. When the Prices arrive, the locals have organized a feast celebration that involved the slaughter of a goat. The fete continues with half-naked women dancing in the moonlight. But of course the primitive food offends the culinary sensibilities of the Georgian women who have smuggled Duncan Hines mixes onto the plane beneath their clothing. And the nakedness of the jungle women provokes preacher Price to spew forth a bunch of nonsense about their iniquities. Needless to say, it breaks up the party.
It's the first in a constant string of cultural faux pas committed by the Prices. What the Prices have done at the welcoming fete is akin to an invited guest entering a wedding reception - packed full of relatives and friends of status - and proceeding to climb onto the table at the front of the hall, to lower their pants, and to piss in the punchbowl. It's the kind of thing a person can be forgiven for doing once, perhaps. Or maybe twice. The Prices do it almost daily for a year. The sense of impending disaster builds with each example.
Early on Nathan Price tries planting seeds imported from Georgia. His garden fails completely. The plants grow monstrous and fail to fruit. Partly it's because Nathan is utterly closed off to help and advice from anyone who knows better. Partly it's because these foreign plants simply cannot fruit here - they lack the necessary pollinators. It's the wrong plant for this place.
After they have been in Kilanga for some months they learn that Nathan's insistence on having children baptized in the nearby river translates into a message that the locals cannot distinguish from a call to offer their children as food to the river's ravenous allegators. Nathan believes he is saving souls. The citizens of Kilanga hear human sacrifice, murder. Nathan, if he had a trace of wisdom or a sense of mission oriented toward actually reaching people would give up on talk of baptism and try a different approach. But Nathan doesn't budge.
As we listen to the voices of the women who tell the story we understand that some of them are shallow, vacuous, petty. But some are wise. The wise ones see their African compatriots as real people and step into their culture. The wise ones help us understand how profoundly narcissistic, blind, closed-minded, tribal Nathan Price is. He literally sees himself as the manifestation of God in the jungle. He sees "unsaved" humans as somehow sub-human. It is axiomatic to him that what he does is good simply because he wishes to save mens' souls. Or perhaps simply because he is Nathan Price. It is a recipe for disaster. Reminds one of a song by the obscure music group Dadgum Swing: "Jesus loves me; but he can't stand you."
During the Price's tenure in Kilanga, Congo gains independence from Belgium. Voting is introduced as an institution. And then when that fails to bring the desired political result, CIA operatives install a brutal dictator, Mobuto Sesi Seko. Things in the village go from bad to worse. Finally, the youngest daughter is bitten by a snake. It's evident that the event is not completely accidental, and Nathan's wife Orleana decides it's time to leave, whether Nathan wants to go or not. Three women walk, including the lame one. The pretty, vacuous daughter flies.
Kingsolver gives us glimpses of their lives over the next several decades. Each life follows a natural arc that follows reasonably from the characters she has created and their strange year in Kilanga. All are affected in profound ways by the experience. Incidentally, we learn that Mobutu dies a lonely death in one of his French Villas. Nathan Price, wide-eyed with madness, is burned in an old watchtower once used by the Belgians to guard the slave-labor miners and keep them from escaping.
So by the end of the novel Kingsolver has literally burnt in effigy a symbol of western hegemony, a symbol of white patriarchy, a symbol of southern cultural myopia, a symbol of narcissim, a symbol of stark fundamentalism. There is no question that the old bastard deserved it. With the evil scourge gone, one wants to feel relieved. Or hopeful. Yet somehow life of knowing is quite painful. Kingsolver makes for the reader knowledge our sins almost as painful as the consequences of being blissfully ignorant. One is tempted to cry "Oh sweet ignorance! Dear God help me never to understand the painful iniquities of my own heart! Give me the blind certainty of Nathan Price in all my affairs. Even if it costs me my family, my friends, my life." One character who seems mind-numbingly stupid inhabits this space. And lives a life of bovine self-satisfaction.
What keeps us from choosing to do the same is not as evident in the novel as it might be. Kingsolver chose instead to show us the miseries inflicted by bad political events. She made her protagonist almost as miserable from the political fallout of an evil dictator as from the sins of a live-in fundamentalist preacher. The story might have been more convincing if there were joy or even satisfaction to temper the pain of knowing. Yet Kingsolver denies her protagonist any sense of joy and gives her only a rare glimpse of satisfaction. To make it otherwise she'd have had to back off from her second goal.
The goal was laudible, but the book seems less effective for the choice. It's sometimes hard to remember that for a message to be persuasive it cannot simply be right, it has to be heard in a way that changes perceptions and practices. It has to offer good choices. How difficult it can be to hear the message we preach with the ears of our audience.
Summary of The Poisonwood Bible: A Novel (P.S.)
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 ClubŪ 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
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