The Poisonwood Bible

This novel by Barbara Kingsolver is quite good and very readable; it’s the story of a missionary family – a couple and four daughters - who end up in the Belgian Congo (later Zaire, later Congo) during the sixties. The father is predictably slightly mad, and goes madder; the girls are equally predictably the ones who get on with things and discover that maybe things aren’t as simple as they’d assumed. In the end each person has a different reaction to what has happened.

Each chapter is narrated by a different female, one of the daughters or the mother, and they have easily distinguishable voices. It flows well, and there’s a good build-up to the climax or the disaster which forms the centre of the novel. On the other hand, a lot of it is commonplace; surely by the 21st century we’ve read enough Heart of Darkness clones, and realise that the westerner entering Africa isn’t going to change it for the better, or even want to. There was definitely still the theme of “missionary evil/aid worker good” (and after Rwanda, you’d assume people would have begun questioning this – and interestingly enough, although the Rwanda horror set off the Zaire coup, there’s no mention of it). The whole “backwards” thing with the child with hemiplegia was grating, and I wonder what people with cerebral palsy would think of the easy cure the writer decides upon! In short, the writer does want you to question, but only so far, and I do wonder how far she has gone herself in thinking outside the boundaries.