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

When novelist Barbara Kingsolver was asked by a reader whether her fiction is based on her own life, she replied that her narratives are not drawn directly from her immediate experience; rather, they emerge from her struggle to give literary form to ideas. As she explained,

I devise a very big question whose answer I believe will be amazing, and maybe shift the world a little bit on its axis. Then I figure out how to create a world in which that question can be asked, and answered. … I populate my setting with characters who'll act out my theme, scratching their heads in wonderment all along the way until their interactions with the world and each other have finally caused them to cry Aha! and my question is answered at last. (http:www.kingsolver.com/dialogue/11_question.htm)

Kingsolver's fascination with such large questions arose from rather unlikely sources. The daughter of a physician, she was born in 1955 and grew up in a poor rural farming area of eastern Kentucky. She reached high school “at the close of the sixties, in the Commonwealth of Kentucky, whose ranking on educational spending was I think around fifty-first” (High Tide in Tucson, 46-7).

As a bookworm who enjoyed writing poetry and short stories, Kingsolver was an outsider among her high school peers, whose expectations upon graduation were to become either farmers or farmers' wives. She was rescued by a high school librarian, who, in giving her a cataloging job, placed her in an environment of books that ultimately led her to her vocation. Browsing as she cataloged books, Kingsolver “caught the scent of a world. I started to dream up intoxicating lives for myself that I could not have conceived without the books” (High Tide in Tucson, 49).

Kingsolver attended DePauw University in Indiana, where she studied biology, graduating magna cum laude in 1977; subsequently, she earned a master of science in biology and ecology at the University of Arizona. A position as a science writer enabled her to combine her scientific training with her interest in writing. Following several years of writing feature stories for such journals as the Nation, the New York Times, and Smithsonian, she published her first book, Holding the Line: Women in the Great Arizona Mine Strike of 1983. The nonfiction narrative focuses on the stories of women in small Arizona mining towns whose lives were radically transformed by an eighteen-month strike against the Phelps Dodge Copper Corporation.

Kingsolver, who still lives in Arizona, has married (twice) and has two young daughters. Her other publications include a volume of poetry, Another America (1992); a volume of essays, High Tide in Tucson: Essays From Now or Never (1995); a collection of short stories, Homeland and Other Stories (1989); and, including The Poisonwood Bible, four novels.

Each of Kingsolver's novels demonstrates her deeper preoccupation with ideas as they achieve expression through the interactions of fully realized characters and events. For example, her training as a biologist is artfully demonstrated in The Bean Trees (1988), as organic metaphors of growth and nurturance in the natural world reflect her characters' progress. Taylor Greer, a young woman from Kentucky on her way west, finds herself the custodian of an utterly endearing 3-year-old Cherokee girl who is left in her car one night. The relationship evolves from Taylor's early attitude toward Turtle—so-named because of her extraordinary grip—as “not really mine … just somebody I got stuck with” to her decision to become the child's legal mother. Along the way, Kingsolver movingly explores issues of moral responsibility and community.

In Pigs in Heaven (1993), Kingsolver extends Taylor and Turtle's story, elaborating on ideas of family, community, ethnicity, and different belief systems as they shape identity. The question animating the latter novel is how to act in a child's best interest when two cultures disagree fundamentally on the matter.

Between these two novels, Kingsolver published Animal Dreams (1990), an absorbing fictional exploration of notions of identity, home, and people's greater relationship to the earth. For Cosima (Codi) Noline, the possibility of reclamation assumes both emotional and political meanings. Returning to her childhood home in Arizona after years away, the disaffected Codi eventually renews her relationship with her father and discovers her affinity with Native American values concerning people and the land.

She is also politically awakened, discovering by accident that the nearby river and land are being poisoned by unchecked chemical pollution from a mining operation. Galvanizing people in her community to rally against the mining company's irresponsibility, Codi explains, “People can forget, and forget, and forget, but the land has a memory. The lakes and the rivers are still hanging on the DDT and every other insult we ever gave them.”

PINNING THE WATER TO ITS BANKS

Although one might term Kingsolver a “political” novelist on the basis of such preoccupations, those matters are always persuasively rendered through character and event. Thus, although The Poisonwood Bible tackles a complicated political question—what happened in and to the Congo during the crucial transition from colonial protectionism to national independence?—Kingsolver avoids didacticism by approaching her subject through multiple perspectives; large issues are filtered through the seemingly small daily challenges and discoveries of particular individuals as they live their lives.

One might ask first, why the Congo, given the southwestern American setting of Kingsolver's previous novels? Though The Poisonwood Bible is not autobiographical, it is based on a personal experience: Kingsolver spent a life-changing year in the Belgian Congo when her father served there as a physician. Considering Africa as a 7-year-old child, she later wrote, “I couldn't begin to imagine the life that was rolling out ahead of me. But I did understand it would pass over me with the force of a river, and that I needed to pin the water to its banks and hold it still, somehow, to give myself time to know it” (High Tide, 119).

In a comment made during a reading in Washington in November 1998, Kingsolver acknowledged that the story that ultimately became The Poisonwood Bible grew from a subject she has been pondering for twenty years, hoping to acquire the wisdom and skill to give it written form. She needn't have worried: She has achieved a narrative of enormous moral depth and aesthetic mastery.

The story centers on the Prices of Bethlehem, Georgia, a Baptist missionary family headed by the fundamentalist Nathan, who intends to bring salvation to the “heathen” of Kilanga, Belgian Congo. Nathan's rigidity and evangelical conviction are so immoderate, however, that he ultimately alienates himself not only from the Kikongo people whom he wishes to convert but from his wife and four young daughters as well. Nathan's story subtly comes to represent the intertwined moral and political failures of colonialism and Western exploitation in West Africa.

When Orleanna Price later reflects on her husband's actions both before and while in the Congo, she concludes that her family was “swallowed by Nathan's mission, body and soul. Occupied as if by a foreign power.” Similarly, various outside interests, blind to the customs and wishes of the indigenous peoples, pursued their own self-serving missions in Africa, with repercussions that continue to affect the region to this day.

When the Prices first arrive in the village near the Kwilu River in 1959, they are all innocents, imperiously believing that Nathan's mission to “bring salvation into the darkness” is ordained by God. Only much later does Orleanna understand that Nathan's error was in trying not only to deliver the word of God but to assume His place.

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. …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.

The last comment effectively frames The Poisonwood Bible: The Price family arrives in Africa literally weighted down with objects carried from America that they believe will be needed for survival in the Congo, from Betty Crocker cake mixes to pinking shears. What they slowly discover is that they “brought all the wrong things”—they are burdened not simply by irrelevant objects and supplies but their beliefs—and that what they carry away when they leave is not their possessions but the distinct and ineradicable mark that Africa has left on each of them.

During their seventeen months in Kilanga, Nathan stubbornly persists in his mission to convert and baptize the natives, oblivious to the fact that they already have a perfectly satisfactory religion. Kingsolver is especially adept at embodying in human terms the collisions between worldviews, both spiritual and secular. While Nathan's daughters come to recognize the undertones that “shimmer under the surface of the words right and wrong,” Nathan, deaf to such subtleties, finds his task further complicated by the richly tonal language of the Kikongo people.

Indeed, language functions not only as a linguistic code but as the source of the deepest possibility for communication or, more often, misunderstanding between people. (One might add that it is Kingsolver's own accomplished language that makes this novel so richly absorbing.) The Kikongo word bangala, for example—which Nathan employs in his frequently repeated evangelical exhortation, “Tata Jesus is bangala!”—carries meanings as contradictory as “most precious,” “most insufferable,” and “poisonwood.” No wonder the villagers are puzzled by the missionary's garbled message.

The Kikongo chief expresses his concern about the moral decline and spiritual corruption of the villagers if they abandon their faith in their traditional spirit-protectors and convert to Christianity; Nathan insensitively retorts that the tribe's spiritual leader is a witch doctor who leads his people in the worship of false idols. The reader, privy to both sides, ponders which idols are the false ones.

WHAT THEY CARRIED WITH THEM

The Poisonwood Bible, Kingsolver's most structurally ambitious novel to date, unfolds through five distinct narrative perspectives. Interestingly, although the author omits Nathan Price's point of view by disclosing the family's sojourn in Africa exclusively through the accounts of his wife and daughters, we know Nathan as well as we know those who speak. Given his monomaniacal vision, his perspective is quite clear, even without the benefit of entry into his thoughts.

Because the Price girls are naive observers, abundant ironies emerge between their limited comprehension and the reader's understanding of events. For example, 14-year-old Adah contemplates the arbitrary injustice revealed by her father's Baptist religion, wondering how a child could be “denied entrance to heaven merely for being born in the Congo rather than, say, north Georgia, where she could attend church regularly. … Would Our Lord be such a hit-or-miss kind of Savior as that? Would he really condemn some children to eternal suffering just for the accident of a heathen birth, and reward others for a privilege they did nothing to earn?”

The early sections narrated by the oldest daughter, going-on-16 Rachel, reveal an utterly conventional adolescent who, because of her pale skin, white eyelashes, and platinum-blond hair, stands out like an albino in Africa and who is far more concerned with the social life she is missing back home in Georgia than with the social customs of the Kikongo people. She is also (unintentionally) comic; her accounts are punctuated by such malapropisms as “I prefer to remain anomalous” and “I was feeling at loose odds and ends.”

The youngest daughter, 5-year-old Ruth May, offers the most naive perspective, that of a child who can scarcely comprehend the magnitude of the challenges that confront her family struggling for survival in the inhospitable African bush, let alone the deeper ramifications of their mission. The least encumbered, she is the first member of the family to connect with the people of Kilanga, teaching her eager peers how to play “Mother-May-I?” Yet even that innocent children's game mimics her father's attitudes, with Ruth May benevolently reigning over the village children as they obediently ask, “Mad-da-meh-yi?”

Between Rachel and Ruth May are the twins, Leah and Adah. Fourteen when they arrive in Kilanga, both girls are intellectually gifted; however, Adah's physical circumstances disguise her exceptional intelligence. Born with hemiplegia, a condition that renders her mute and severely lame, she is, for most of the narrative, a silent observer whose words only the reader hears. Yet those words are often composed of marvelous poetry, wordplay, and a “slant vision” that uniquely melds her accommodation to her physical handicap and her fascination with Emily Dickinson: “tell the truth but tell it slant.”

As a result of her ability to read not only forwards but backwards, Adah enjoys creating palindromes.

“Walk to learn. I and Path. Long one is Congo.”

“Congo is one long path and I learn to walk.”

“That is the name of my story, forward and backward.”

“Manene is the word for path: Manene enenam, amen. On the Congo's one long manene Ada learns to walk, amen. One day she nearly does not come back. Like Daniel she enters the lions' den, but lacking Daniel's pure and unblemished soul, Ada is spiced with the flavors of vice that make for a tasty meal. Pure and unblemished souls must taste very bland, with an aftertaste of bitterness.”

As this passage suggests, Kingsolver is especially successful at creating a distinctively nuanced idiom, perspective, and voice for each of her characters; one can quite clearly hear them speak. Moreover, drawing on the fact that the Price family is steeped in Nathan's Bible-thumping evangelism, Kingsolver effectively plays the girls' emerging insights against scriptural parallels.

Adah's twin, Leah, emerges as the wise child and moral consciousness of the Price family. Her concern with social justice first develops within their own village circumstances and later expands to encompass the history and future of the Congo itself. Like Adah, she is fascinated with language:

In the beginning we were just about in the same boat as Adam and Eve. We had to learn the names of everything. Nkoko, mongo, zulu—river, mountain, sky—everything must be called out from the void by the word we use to claim it. All God's creatures have names, whether they slither across our path or show up for sale at our front stoop. … Our very own backyard resembles the Garden of Eden. I copy down each new word in my school notebook and vow to remember it always, when I am a grown-up American lady with a backyard garden of my own. I shall tell all the world the lessons I learned in Africa.

WHAT THEY TOOK AWAY

The voices and perspectives of the four Price daughters are counterpointed by that of their mother, whose commentaries begin all but one of the novel's seven major sections. Unlike her daughters' accounts of daily life in Kilanga, Orleanna's are narrated years later, after she has returned to Georgia to ponder what happened to her family in Africa. Her reflections are colored by the moral perspective not of innocents in paradise but, as it were, after the fall; Orleanna struggles to comprehend her own complicity in tragic events and—with difficulty—to forgive herself.

Each member of the Price family is marked in a different way by the experience in the Congo. In addition to learning to surrender ideas they had taken for granted about such matters as how to raise crops (Nathan brings Kentucky Wonder bean seeds from Georgia but disdains valuable advice from a village elder on how to plant them and watches his potential crop wash away in a rainstorm) or how to protect themselves from other encroachments of the environment, the children are daily exposed to events that test their American assumptions.

During their ill-fated sojourn, they contend with aggravations and dangers large and small: sunburn, boredom, mosquitoes, malaria, poisonous snakes and poisonwood trees, parasites, worms, driver ants, crocodiles, and lions—to say nothing of the extremes of drought and torrential rain and the shocks of famine, illness, and death. As Leah wryly observes, “Africa has a thousand ways to get under your skin.”

Nonetheless, far more than their parents, the four girls endeavor (to different degrees) to adapt: to learn the local language and customs, to befriend their Kikongo peers, and to understand cultural differences as the complicated politics of the country's transition to political independence swirl above their heads. Still, as Adah phrases it, “the things we do not know, independently and in unison as a family, would fill two separate baskets, each with a large hole in the bottom.”

While Orleanna struggles simply to keep her family alive in a hostile environment (even cooking is a thrice-daily struggle), Leah—guided by Anatole, a Congolese schoolteacher—slowly comes to understand the meaning of colonialism. As Belgium siphons off the country's natural riches—diamonds and rubber—America and Russia compete for a stake in the Congo's postindependence future by manipulating political events. The hasty death of the country's first democratically elected leader, Patrice Lumumba, following the election of 1960, is presumably orchestrated by the CIA to thwart the Soviet Union, the perceived challenger to American interests in the region. Leah, in the light of her increasing political awareness, weighs her loyalty to her father against her growing disillusionment with his mission.

The Poisonwood Bible is chock-full of interesting, vividly drawn characters and surprising turns of plot, far too many to summarize here. Two-thirds of the novel encompasses the seventeen months that the Price family lives in Kilanga, concluding with terrible losses both in their family and in the country; the remaining third of the narrative follows each of the surviving Prices over nearly thirty succeeding years. Without revealing crucial details that readers are better rewarded by discovering on their own, I will simply note that it is the Congo that exacts its price on the Prices and not the other way around.

Following different paths out of Kilanga according to their distinct perspectives, each Price daughter ultimately makes peace with Africa and gives something back to it. As Leah phrases it, “we've all ended up giving up body and soul to Africa, one way or another.” Each comes to appreciate the “balance between loss and salvation”; however, what each gives back is as different as are Nathan's daughters themselves. As Rachel comes to realize, “You can't just sashay into the jungle aiming to change it all over to the Christian style, without expecting the jungle to change you right back. … Some fellow thinks he's going to be the master of Africa and winds up with his nice European-tailored suit rumpled in a corner and his wits half cracked from the filaires [parasites] itching under his skin. If it was as easy as they thought it was going to be, why, they'd be done by now, and Africa would be just like America with more palm trees. Instead, most of it still looks exactly how it did a zillion years ago.”

From a different perspective, Ruth May, the daughter who is granted the narrative's final commentary, concludes that “every life is different because you passed this way and touched history. … Everyone is complicit.”

The satisfaction for readers of The Poisonwood Bible are many, including Kingsolver's brilliant braiding of fictional invention, historical fact, and emotional truth as she distills a complex moral and political vision. Drawing her readers into the contingencies of a fully imagined time and place, the author invites us to reconsider American notions of family and faith as they intersect—or, rather, collide—with culture, history, and destiny in West Africa in the 1960s and afterward. Magisterially, Kingsolver lets us see, hear, and feel how each of her characters has “touched history.”