[In the following review, Ewert offers tempered assessment of The Poisonwood Bible, citing weaknesses in Kingsolver's “heavy-handed” interpretation of events.]

In 1890 Joseph Conrad traveled to the Congo in the employ of a Belgian trading company, under contract as a steamboat pilot. He made only one trip upriver before returning to England, desperately ill with dysentery and sick also of what he'd seen in the Congo. What he'd seen—gross cruelty inflicted by European colonists on the Congolese—became the subject of his novel Heart of Darkness. But Conrad's own conflicted position on race makes his novel notoriously resistant to interpretation. Do its most famous words, “The horror, the horror,” refer to the hypocrisy of the Belgians who preached Christian enlightenment while profiting from the enforced slavery of millions, or to “unspeakable rites” Conrad thought were practiced by the Congolese?

Shadows of Conrad's book run through Barbara Kingsolver's newest novel, The Poisonwood Bible. Based on Kingsolver's childhood experience in the Congo, the novel takes the reader to a 20th Century Congolese village to show precisely where the horror lies—in the act of colonizing: white men taking over the Congo, husbands taking over their wives' minds and lives, one culture taking over another. Her novel floods light on the darkest consequences of those acts, although Kingsolver's outrage sometimes overpowers her narrative.

The Poisonwood Bible recounts the misfortunes of Nathan Price and his family. Price is an American missionary on a holy crusade who arrives in the Congo in 1959 without knowledge of the country's language or the least understanding of its culture. He sets out to evangelize his village by insulting its leaders, tries to baptize children in a river he fails to realize is full of crocodiles, and mangles the language so badly that he refers to Jesus as “poisonwood,” a local plant that causes hives and intense itching. The novel is not a wholesale indictment of Western missionary efforts in the Congo, although it's merciless in its critique of the sort of missionary who lacked interest in the distinctive culture and history of the region, or was even able to admit that it had a culture and a history separate from his own egotistical efforts.

Kingsolver is careful to present another kind of missionary also, those who “organize hospitals under thatched roofs, or stoop alongside village Mamas to plant soybeans, or rig up electrical generators for a school.” And Nathan himself is only one culprit. Behind him stand the hundreds of other white men who made decisions about the Congo without consulting any Congolese (American and Belgian trading companies, the CIA and an American president); who conspired to murder its first democratically elected president and keep it enslaved to the International Monetary Fund through costly, pointless projects it couldn't afford; and who maintain a greedy and utterly amoral leader who helped them rob his country of its extraordinary natural resources.

The story, however, is not told by any of these, but by the five women that Nathan enslaves in his own household. His wife, Orleanna, has been carefully taught by her husband that God rewards virtue, and that their lifelong poverty and misery were God's punishments for a failure of virtue—a failure that could only be hers, as Nathan himself is perfectly righteous. “Lodged in the heart of darkness,” is how Orleanna describes her marriage.

Out of that darkness come four daughters: Rachel is a budding Barbie, who looks disdainfully at the Congo's sacrificial victims and thinks, “I refuse to feel the slightest responsibility. I really do.” The twins, Leah and Adah, are in many ways the moral center of the novel. Leah worships her father until her innate sense of justice forces her to reject him, and to spend her life saving a Congo he never even observed. Adah is the novel's most complex character. Born with a damaged brain and a crippled right side, she reads backwards and forwards and prefers her name spelled Ada to accommodate that. (Readers of Nabokov will appreciate the reference to his masterpiece of linguistic legerdemain, Ada.) Her isolation in a crippled body leads Adah to sympathize with the plight of the Congolese under Nathan's gospel: Would God condemn children to eternal suffering merely for having been born out of earshot of the gospel, she asks her American Sunday school teacher before the family departs. She is sent to the corner and forced to pray while kneeling on grains of rice for an hour for daring to even question God's plan. The baby in the family, Ruth May, is too young to know how to judge the Congo, and merely accepts it as it is. She is the only one mourned in the Congolese village when the missionary effort goes awry.

These women's narratives—especially in the first half of the novel, as they anticipate the tragedy that marks the end of the mission—are compelling, lyrical and utterly believable. As Congolese independence approaches, however, Kingsolver's writing becomes more heavy-handed, insisting on interpreting the meaning of the events for us in ways that the most sympathetic reader may find intrusive.

The parrot Methuselah, for example, is a potent symbol of the Congo, pre- and post-independence. Captured from the wild and kept in a tiny cage, Methuselah learns too well the discourse of his white masters, mechanically repeating their prayers, but also their secret curses. Nathan throws him back into the jungle for this crime, but the bird's wings are too stunted to fly far, and he hangs around the compound, begging for scraps. The analogy is clear enough, more so when he is slaughtered by a rapacious civet cat on the very morning of independence. Yet Kingsolver insists on also providing the obvious interpretation, as though her readers could not quite be trusted to get it right: “At last it is Independence day, for Methuselah and the Congo. … After a lifetime caged away from flight and truth, comes freedom. … This is what he leaves to the world: gray and scarlet feathers strewn over the damp grass. … Only feathers, without the ball of Hope inside.”

The second half of the novel, which traces the adult lives of Nathan's daughters, is too often characterized by this sort of heavy-handed exposition and plot summary, and we begin to lose track of the women's daily experience. Kingsolver's outrage over what happened “the day a committee of men decided to murder the fledgling Congo” is historically justified, but her novel is weakest when she begins to use her protagonists to merely vent that anger, rather than letting them speak (as they do in the first half) to the rich complexities of their personal experience.