[In the following review, Leonard offers favorable evaluation of The Poisonwood Bible.]

Out of a child's game of Mother May I, looked down upon by a green snake in an alligator-pear tree, Barbara Kingsolver has dreamed a magnificent fiction and a ferocious bill of indictment. The mothers so solicited are white American and black Congolese and matriarchal Africa herself. In their turn, on their knees, keening like birds in a rain of blood, these mothers beseech some principle of naming and knowing, some macrohistorical scale of justice and some mechanism of metamorphosis to console them for their lost children. As in the keyed chords of a Baroque sonata, movements of the personal, the political, the historical and even the biological contrast and correspond. As in a Bach cantata, the choral stanza, the recitatives and the da capo arias harmonize. And a magical-realist forest sings itself to live forever.

To be less lofty about it, Kingsolver, whose own public-health-worker parents took her to the Congo when she was a child, who has been thinking about that season for thirty years while she wrote other, quieter, less ambitious books like Animal Dreams and The Bean Trees, has gone back to Africa and somehow transfigured it. The Poisonwood Bible is not a Safari Novel. Her village, her river, her forest and her snake aren't symbol dumps or Rorschach tests or manhood rites or local-color souvenirs—nor a pilgrim's gasbag progress past Pygmies to afflatus. An intelligence in transit will invest itself in and be exacerbated by particulars of place; the North American is unmoored, unmasked, astigmatic and complicit; the woman is decoupled, unchosen, rewound; a shadow world of the geopolitical and the clandestine rolls over domestic scruple. Not Conrad's heart-of-darkness lapel pin, Graham Greene's crucifix, Hemingway's penis fetish or Evelyn Waugh's slice of Hamlet on wry toast is powerful enough to protect these tourists from the mamba eye of Kingsolver up an alligator-pear tree, all-seeing, all-knowing …

From the peanut plains of Bethlehem, Georgia, in the peach-blossom summer of 1959, on a twelve-month mission to baptize and civilize the animistic heathen, the Rev. Nathan Price, his wife, Orleanna, and their four daughters arrive in a Congo still Belgian (though not for long)—to be greeted by bare breasts and goat stew. Before they can extricate themselves from Kilanga, they will have endured a year and a half of hunger and disease, ants and snakes, wars and witchcraft, Lumumba and Mobutu, Ike and the CIA. For their incomprehension, a Price will be paid: a portion of their sanity, all their arrogance and one of their girls. On the day the child dies, so does Lumumba.

The Price women, all remarkable, take contrapuntal turns telling the story:

Orleanna, whose dreams are full of eyes in the trees, of rivers of wishes, of animal teeth, blames herself for failing to protect her children from Africa and their father: “No wonder they hardly seemed to love me half the time—I couldn't step in front of my husband to shelter them from his scorching light. They were expected to look straight at him and go blind.” And: “I wonder what you'll name my sin: Complicity? Loyalty? Stupefaction? … Is my sin a failure of virtue, or of competence?” And: “Poor Congo, barefoot bride of men who took her jewels and promised the Kingdom.” And: “Maybe I'll even confess the truth, that I rode in with the horsemen and beheld the apocalypse, but still I'll insist I was only a captive witness. What is the conqueror's wife, if not a conquest herself?” Finally: “And now I am one more soul walking free in a white skin, wearing some thread of the stolen goods: cotton or diamonds, freedom at the very least, prosperity. Some of us know how we came by our fortune, and some of us don't, but we wear it all the same. There's only one question worth asking now: How do we aim to live with it?”

Rachel, the oldest daughter at sweet 16, “the most extreme blonde imaginable,” a Queen of Sheba in her green linen Easter suit, batting her white-rabbit eyelashes, painting her fingernails bubblegum pink to match her headband, is shocked to be anywhere with “no new record album by the Platters” but capable of entertaining her sisters with imitation radio commercials: “Medically tested Odo-ro-no, stops underarm odor and moisture at the source!” She's also the mistress of the delicious malaprop: “feminine wilds,” “sheer tapestry of justice” and, best of all, “Who is the real Rachel Price? … I prefer to remain anomalous.” Tata Ndu, the village chief, asks for her hand in marriage, and Eeben Axelroot, the Afrikaner bush pilot, diamond smuggler and CIA mercenary, bargains for the rest of her. If Rachel never imagined the Congo to be more than a story she'd someday tell “when Africa was faraway and make-believe like the people in history books,” she still knows how to bounce: “Honestly, there is no sense spending too much time alone in the dark.” And so she won't.

Ruth May, the youngest—“my little beast, my eyes, my favorite stolen egg,” her mother calls her—populates the village with the “Lone Ranger, Cinderella, Briar Rose, and the Tribes of Ham”; teaches Tumba, Bangwa, Mazuzi and Nsimba to play Mother May I; refuses to take her quinine tablets; is so thin-skinned that she suffers Africa like a bruise; and carries around a magic matchbox with a picture of a lion on it and a chicken bone inside and a tiny hole with a tiny peg, in order to disappear herself. One of her sisters, pushing Ruth May in a swing, thinks this:

She flew forward and back and I watched her shadow in the white dust under the swing. Each time she reached the top of her arc beneath the sun, her shadow legs were transformed into the thin, curved legs of an antelope, with small rounded hooves at the bottom instead of feet. I was transfixed and horrified by the image of my sister with antelope legs. I knew it was only shadow and the angle of the sun, but still it's frightening when things you love appear suddenly changed from what you have always known.

Leah, “the tonier twin,” the tomboy Goddess of the Hunt, only ceases to be desperate for the approval of her father when she decides he's insane. And keeps a pet owl even though owls are known to devour souls. And is called “Leba” by the villagers, which means “fig tree” in Kikongo, instead of “Léa,” which means “nothing much.” And is called “béene-béene” by the schoolteacher/revolutionary Anatole, which means “as true as the truth can be.” And will be taught by Anatole to shoot arrows from a bow he carves for her from greenheart wood. And has read enough Jane Eyre and Brenda Starr to realize she's fallen in love with this Anatole who “moves through the dappled shade at the edges of my vision, wearing the silky pelt of a panther.” This is how Leah will end up:

I rock back and forth on my chair like a baby, craving so many impossible things: justice, forgiveness, redemption. I crave to stop bearing all the wounds of this place on my own narrow body. But I also want to be a person who stays, who goes on feeling anguish where anguish is due. I want to belong somewhere. … To scrub the hundred years' war off this white skin till there's nothing left and I can walk out among my neighbors wearing raw sinew and bone, like they do.

Most of all, my white skin craves to be touched and held by the one man on earth I know has forgiven me for it.

And finally Adah, the damaged Quasimodo twin: speechless and limping, she is always left behind, even by her mother in the plague of ants; “I have long relied on the comforts of martyrdom.” She was born “with half my brain dried up like a prune, deprived of blood by an unfortunate fetal mishap. My twin sister, Leah, and I are identical in theory, just as in theory we are all made in God's image. … But I am a lame gallimaufry and she remains perfect.” In the Congo, though, nobody stares at her misshapenness; most of them have something missing, too. In Katanga she is called “white little crooked girl.” And in her crooked mind, from phrases she's found in Edgar Allan Poe, Emily Dickinson, William Carlos Williams and Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, she will make wicked palindromes: “Amen enema,” “eros, eyesore,” and “Evil, all its sin is still alive!”

There is nothing Adah doesn't notice, bringing up the rear: the bodies of dead children wrapped in layers of cloth “like a large goat cheese,” under a funeral arch of palm fronds, with the howling sweet scent of frangipani; her father's First Evangelical Church of the Lost of Cause, full of lepers and outcasts, who try Jesus on for size because nothing else has fit; the fact that “bangala” pronounced one way means “precious,” but pronounced as her father does (“Jesus is bangala!”) means “poisonwood”: The Lord will make you itch. It is Adah who learns in Africa that “the transition from spirit to body and back to spirit again” is a “ride on the power of nommo, the force of a name to call oneself.” Nommo rains from a cloud, or rises in the vapor from a human mouth: “a song, a scream, a prayer.” And it's Adah who echoes her mother: “All human odes are essentially one. ‘My life: what I stole from history, and how to live with it.’”

The history they steal from belongs to their family (an abusive and cowardly father, gone mad for the second time in a Third World jungle: the missionary position as a form of rape); the village (which refuses baptism because the river is full of crocodiles, although Mother May I is another matter); the Congo of the Belgians (where white occupiers cut off the hands of black workers who failed to meet their rubber-plantation quota); a Congo briefly free to elect its own future (independent for just fifty-one days in 1960, before Eisenhower authorized the murder of Lumumba for the greater glory of rubber, copper, Katanga's diamonds and the cold war); all of Africa; and all of empire. As Orleanna understands in retrospect:

We aimed for no more than to have dominion over every creature that moved upon the earth. And so it came to pass that we stepped down there on a place we believed unformed, where only darkness moved on the face of the waters. Now you laugh, day and night, while you gnaw on my bones. But what else could we have thought? Only that it began and ended with us. What do we know, even now? Ask the children. Look at what they grew up to be. We can only speak of the things we carried with us, and the things we took away.

How they live with what they stole involves frogs, monkeys, thatch, mud, a parrot named Methuselah and a chameleon named Leon. It includes mosquito netting and malaria pills, breadfruit and manioc, bushbuck and gecko, elephant grass and bougainvillea, tarantulas in the bananas and hookworms in the shoes. It engages a six-toed nanga, Tata Kuvudundu, who leaves bones in a calabash bowl in a puddle of rain and his guilty footprints in the white dust around the chicken house, where “a basket of death” waits in ambush. It will take us up a colonial watchtower, into a circle of fire, as far away as Angola, Jo'burg and the Great Rift Valley, all the way back to Atlanta, for graduate work in viruses and whiteness. It will seek some sort of balance—“between loss and salvation,” damage and transgression—and settle for … what, precisely? A forgiving song instead of a punishing Verse? Some “miracle of dread or reverence”? An okapi like a unicorn? As once upon a time there had been the four American daughters of Nathan and Orleanna Price, “pale, doomed blossoms … bodies as tight as bowstrings,” so in the future there will be the four African sons of Leah and Anatole, “the colors of silt, loam, dust, and clay, an infinite palette for children of their own”—suggesting to their mother “that time erases whiteness altogether.”

In case I haven't made myself clear, what we have here—with this new, mature, angry, heartbroken, expansive out-of-Africa Kingsolver—is at last our very own Lessing and our very own Gordimer, and she is, as one of her characters said of another in an earlier novel, “beautiful beyond the speed of light.”