A lone voice crying in the wilderness

Nathan Price has lofty ideals in The Poisonwood Bible. Barabara Kingsolver's multifaceted 1999 novel weaves together themes explored in Alcott's Little Women, Conrad's Heart of Darkness, and Burdick & Lederer's The Ugly American. Nathan would bring the Word of (his) God to the peoples of the dark continent, but His Word is swallowed up by the immensity of African culture as surely as Price's own tiny cries are swallowed up by the gloom of the African jungle.

Nathan, never one to plan ahead, believed that he could single-handedly change the lives of not just a tiny village in the Belgian Congo, but at the same time start a spiritual revolution that would raise all African tribesmen out of despair and into The Light. But Nathan didn't do his homework before he left his home in Georgia and, like all who arrive unprepared, he failed. He failed not because his heart was not in his work, but because his head was not in it.

Why should we care? We care because Nathan did not embark on his journey alone. The fire-and-brimstone spouting Baptist missionary took with him his wife and their four daughters, and it is through the eyes and the voices of the five women in the Price family that we learn the details of Nathan's folly. Their daily village life grinds drearily on even as thirty-year struggle for independence stirs to life about them.

The Price daughters (Rachel, Leah, Adah, and Ruth May) each tell their own story of their time in Africa, in an eerie near-parody of the tales of Alcott's March sisters. Kingsolver has represented well the four essential elements in the four little Price women: air is the vacuous Rachel; earth can only be earth-mother Leah; fire bespeaks the bright, ethereal Ruth May; and Adah is water: unaffected by changes in the shape of her environment. Orleanna, their mother, represents a whole that is greater than the sum of her parts.

Though Kingsolver rarely writes in her voice, it is Orleanna who is the pivot about which all The Poisonwood Bible revolves. It is she, not her husband, who raises the children in this alien environment; it is she, not her husband, who ultimately witnesses her faith to the villagers. It is she, not her husband, who learns to bridge an almost insurmountable gap between the cultures of 1960's Baptist Georgia and animist Africa. She surefootledly leads her daughters through the jungle of the Congo River just as she leads them through the jungle of life with an irrational father.

Kingsolver, as always, has written with one eye firmly fixed on the natural world -- in the belly of the Congo River, how could she not? As she detailed the frailty of human life in an unforgiving jungle and the complete unsuitability of the trappings of Nathan's native culture in such a setting, I was reminded over and over of the futility of Lederer and Burdick's ugly Americans. Father Price arrives in Africa ready to preach, but willing to reach those souls only on the terms of his urban upbringing. The more he refuses to bend from his rigid system, the further his future and his family slip away from him. It is his refusal to accept that other cultures are different -- not better, not worse, just different -- that ultimately defeats him. While he dwindles to a shell, the women of the family grow and thrive because they (except perhaps Rachel) are capable of adaptation, and accepting of the wisdom of another culture.

The voices of The Poisonwood Bible are the voices of women, and that is fitting. It is fitting because, in Kingsolver's own worldview, the jungle is eternally female; ever mother to the world. The male culture exemplified by Nathan Price would attempt to subdue the jungle, and by extension the cultures of the jungle, by force main. Some readers will find this dichotomy off-putting, as it is not in keeping with their politics. It's surprisingly likely, though, that many of these same readers are entirely comfortable with the Men are from Mars... genre. Go figure.

Although The Poisonwood Bible marks a different locale for Kingsolver, reaching out from her North American roots to a distant continent; the foci of her novel remain the same as the rest of her writings. In The Poisonwood Bible as in the rest of her fiction, Kingsolver's themes celebrate the beauty and power of the environment and evoke the strength and power of women. This novel's status as a best-seller is no accident; it stands out head and shoulders among the contrived pap and formulaic fiction of the Grishams and the Ludlums. I look forward to delving into her back list.