Masterpiece. It took me nearly a month to finish it.
It ends here.

" I walked through the valley of my fate, is all, and learned to love what I could lose " (p.369)


I have been aiming over the past few years to read at least equal numbers of books by male and female authors and so I started this because I knew I had read three books by men so far this year, plainly I needed to consciously start to even up the scales.

Two thirds of the book deals with a period of about two years in a village in the Congo, around the time of independence, with some flash backs in memory to the 1940s, the final third moves up the beginning of the 90s and takes place in a number of different countries.

The story concerns an American baptist preacher, Nathan Price, who leads his family of wife and four daughters, three teenagers and one significantly younger child into the jungle, and what happens to them, and the impact those two years have on the rest of their lives. There is a winking analogy to the Vietnam war - a prologue chapter is called The Things We Carried. There is hubris, grand objectives that are in fact too nebulous and grounded in ignorance about the local situation to lead to anything other than disaster and a glance at the table of contents gives you a good idea of what is to come: Genesis, Revelation, Judges, Exodus... You probably won't be surprised if I tell you that the preacher is a domestic tyrant, violent and a martinet, that this is rooted in his insecurities and deep sense of sin and failure due to surviving WWII instead of dying in the Philippines jungle along with the rest of his unit  he has some other problems too of course. So far it's plainly going to be an unsubtle bundle of paper, but that's ok, a good story doesn't have to be subtle, just well told. Equally there came a point when I felt that all that this was just the surface, that underneath the themes were developing slowly and occasionally asserting themselves.

The two that I saw were Communication / miscommunication, and fixicity / movement, all of which were in dialectic.

One review took offence at this book finding the portrayal of missionaries unsympathetic and unduly negative. Nathan Price certainly comes across poorly because he is utterly fixed in his personal past, he speaks, but rarely listens, and he doesn't seem to understand what he does hear either, he seeks to impose a Christianity which reflects the civilisation of the mid- century USA rather than one that might complement or support the spiritual needs of the village. His communication is mostly in English, translated by the village school teacher, supplemented by some words in French or the local language which he mispronounces, since the local language is tonal he frequently is saying something quite different to what he intended which gives rise the book's title. There are other missionaries in the book, overall the picture is nuanced but in terms of the development of the novel my impression was that the rights or wrongs of missionaries were not relevant, the book was more about the psychological unfolding of the five women who follow their lord and master into the jungle.

The preacher, as I said, is fixed in his past and everything he does is in relation to his war-time experience, the women though are still able to flow and eventually are able to slip away and to develop other lives. Kingsolver evoked Heraclitus for me in the middle of this novel with the forcing together of opposites coupled with showing us that everything is changing - not always fast enough, equally sometimes too quickly, another missionary figure suggests a synthesis between fixity and flow by describing himself as grafted on to Africa, and since trees at least in this particular village are viewed as animate this allows us to see the characters as rooted by potentially capable of growth, being transplanted, being grafted on to other lives or having others grafted on to them.

However the characters are all hampered by issues of communication, the wife can't speak as an equal to her husband, the husband doesn't share a language with the people he wishes to convert and he can't talk about the issues that deeply effect him, the characters are at first literally restricted to English not that that even allows easy communication with other English speakers. Non-verbal communication is important, later we are told that the Congolese are constantly scanning the people they see assessing their bearing and presentation to understand their social position. We also see that the missionary family are so deep within their own culture that they can't understand the sub-texts of what they are told or the meaning of what they are shown. This is a story that continues to unfold, another few chapters further up the path can offer quite a different perspective on what has gone before.

For me this was a book that became compelling in the last third, almost unputdownable, as I was so eager to see how the lives of the women grew after their experience and how it marked them. As an added bonus for me, I can see this in relation to her non-fiction book animal, vegetable, miracle which I had enjoyed reading some years ago.

The Poisonwood Bible is about a Southern Baptist family that decides to go be missionaries in the Congo in 1960, just before the country was supposedly granted its independence from Belgium. The Prices didn't bother with language or culture training, they just took off to spread the word about Jesus. Of course they weren't prepared for what they found, so of course they got in a lot of trouble.

I can't exactly put my finger on what I didn't like. I just know that it felt like it dragged on and on and on and on. I sort of expected the book to end when they finally left the village, but I still had another 150 pages to go. It could be that I never really cared much about any of the characters, although I was glad when it was Adah's turn to tell part of the story because I did like her wordplay.

I gathered from the forward that the author spent time in the Congo as a child, so she is telling a story that she has some first-hand knowledge of. And I was left wondering when we in the US are ever going to learn to keep our nose out of other countries' business. We are not painted in a very flattering light in this book.

All I can say is that this was not the book for me. I'm rapidly reaching the conclusion that I should stay away from Oprah's books because I don't think I've really enjoyed any of them. That being said, if you like Oprah's books, you will probably like this one also.

My official review "Tata Jesus is Bängala":

I finished the last 300 pages in 2 days (which is very fast for me - English books). I felt every emotion under the sky with this book. I hated Nathan Price, I hated injustice, I hated my uselessness, I hated the fact that there are no good prospects for Africa in the future. As a Geographic major I strongly believe that the closer you are to the Equator, the longer it will remain an underdeveloped country. Of course the country itself is full of resources (in non-foods) that could make them rich, but nothing can feed the overpopulated cities. Politics obstruct any way of turning diamonds into food. Anyway,
I loved the fact the author talked so much about how they processed their lives and experiences in the Congo. To some degree that's how I am. I grew up poor and desolate and now live in this insane country where everything is available. I feel restless and unsettles at times. Like Orleanna who can't wear shoes in Atlanta because she needs to feel dirt between her feet I prefer to walk to church (with stroller and kids) in Minus degree weather because that's my connection to my family and culture in Germany. Nobody gets it when we arrive at church with red noses, fully aware that we have a functional car.
I love and miss Ruth May. I cried a lot about dead animal. I laughed at her timely wittiness in describing the culture clashes.

I learned one important point about African culture. The author lingered on the fact that Africans (especially villagers) can't grasp the fact of a family owning or keeping more than they need or consume at any point. When a fisherman caught a full net he immediately shares with his village. People don't ask for fish or thank for the fish. They just take. Because that's how it is. When the Prices arrived there with storage the kids came to beg at their door. Not because they were greedy or rude but that's how the village functions.

We have many African immigrants in our ward and neighborhood (sometimes I am the only white person in a store on any given day). For example when the Relief Society announces a committee meeting "With refreshments" some African women just show up. They go straight to the refreshment table (in the middle of the meeting, untouched foods and all) eat, and then go home. None has a calling but hears the call to eat the offered food. There is an abundance and they have no money for food. It's all logical to them to eat when it's available if they were invited or not. There are also many problems with African can't getting off welfare. Honorable families don't understand the reason not to take when it's for everyone to take and use. There is no thinking about the future, just filling the belly now.

One of our Book Club books this year is "A Framework for Understanding Poverty" by Ruby K Payne to help us interact better.

I loved it. It was a good book. A few flaws but easily forgivable for the beautiful philosophical writing. It was the best epic I read so far.

This book was fascinating for a variety of reasons for me. Not only is it set in the jungles of Congo, but the structure really sucked me in so much more than a lot of books. Barbara Kingsolver obviously spent a lot of time researching this book (according to the P.S. text, a couple of decades)--there's a huge list of references used, and the details within the text made me feel almost as if I'd actually been to a little town deep within the jungles of Congo.

Kingsolver had a very nice variety of character perspectives, rather than telling the story all from one person's point-of-view. All of the daughters have very different voices, as well as the mother. Leah is the most trusting of her father's preaching, and for a good chunk of the novel spends her time doting on her father and not really realizing how wrong he was on a lot of things. Rachel gets fairly annoying at times, with how stuck-up she can be, but in the end I did like her for her honesty. Adah, the "twisted child," is very poetic and I found myself looking forward to her passages the most, with her play-on-words and general pessimistic take on the whole situation. Ruth May felt a lot like a filler character at times, although in the end I did appreciate her innocent take on everything.

I actually learned a few things about the Congo by reading this--it's not an area I knew much about (just generals that are commonly known, like the diamond trade), so it was a bit of a history lesson mixed in with a very interesting story.

I was a bit iffy of the final 150-ish pages, where it seemed like the story was over...but it kept going. In the end, I was really glad Kingsolver decided to do the rest of the story in the way she did--in those 150 pages, she covers about 30 years of the after-effects on the family. You never get the full story of what happened to certain characters, but in a time of turmoil like that you wouldn't in reality...so it works. It's pretty interesting to see how much some of the daughters changed after the horrible failure of their father's mission, and how very little one daughter changed. It turned into more than a story of a failed Baptist preacher attempting to convert the members of a little Congolese town, but a story of the long-reaching effects of one man.

Definitely a powerful book, and I'm so glad I picked it up on a whim! It was slow-going most of the time (it took me much longer to read this than I expected--more out of savoring it than it being a difficult read, because it was definitely easy yet poetic language), but it was definitely worth the effort.

I came to this book with The Bean Trees still fresh in my mind, confident that I would enjoy it thoroughly. I found it a very different kind of novel, in many respects (e.g., the alternating voices of multiple narrators, the very different locale (the Belgian Congo instead of the American Southwest), and the author's increasingly intrusive political message). While I adapted to the changes and got through to the end, it was not the enjoyable experience I'd hoped for. I understand that for the author it was a more ambitious undertaking and acknowledge that pushing the limits on one's craft is the right thing to do. However, in such cases there's the risk of attempting more than can be successfully done.

Like The Bean Trees, this one celebrates the virtue of personal loyalty. That aspect of it comes through loud and clear. Drawing characters like Anatole, who are more than plausible, is one of Kingsolver's strengths. Another is her ability to get the most out of our language in telling a story. After reading this, I think Kingsolver should stick with what she does best.

In trying to get my arms around what I dislike about this book, I'll just say it began with mounting frustration over the helplessness of the mother and her daughters in the unspeakable situation created by Rev Price (who, we eventually learn, suffered from an untreated mental illness/brain injury).

On top of this was laid a very biased explanation of African history. Both the UN and the French government concur that the Eisenhower administration did NOT have a hand in the assassination of The Congo's first elected leader, as Kingsolver charges. On the contrary, Lumumba was deposed by a political rival, Kasa-Vubu, and he suffered what likely would have been the other guy's fate had the coup not succeeded. I'm sorry it suits Kingsolver's purposes to imply a parallel between her deranged character Rev. Price and the country he came from as the common source of the turmoil described here, because this fictional work is likely the only input many readers will ever have on the subject. Then, at the end of the book, two of the grown daughters are leading peaceful lives across the borders of Angola and the Republic of Congo, two countries with equally atrocious Marxist rule that the author completely ignores. This is no way for anyone to get their history.

Ok, one other gripe, now that I've gotten myself worked up: One of the Price daughters is nonverbal and presumably suffers from CP or something similar (i.e., congenital brain injury). Once she's grown she gets a little advice from a friend and performs some therapy upon herself and -- voila! -- she's cured. And not only cured but in short order a graduate of medical school. As the parent of an adult with a congenital brain injury, I truly hate to see anyone pretend that such things work out that easily.

In short, I liked Barbara Kingsolver a lot more before I picked up this book.

I had been meaning to read The Poisonwood Bible for the longest time, and it didn't disappoint. It is an epic family saga of vibrant, memorable characters and the enormous challenges they face.

The story begins in the late 1950s. Nathan Price, a stubborn Baptist preacher, decides to take his wife Orleanna and their four daughters to the Belgian Congo, in an attempt to convert the natives to Christianity. The scale of the task soon becomes apparent. The family take up residence in an extremely poor village, where food is scarce and the climate is brutal - a long way from the American luxury they are used to. This alien environment tests their resilience to the very limit. And though they are initially welcomed by the locals, Nathan's missionary efforts are met with no little resistance. Some of the girls adjust to the new way of life better than others, but it seems as though there is always another obstacle for them to tackle.

Each chapter is narrated by a different family member, except for Nathan. It's a clever idea, as we discover the impact that this abusive, monstrous man had on his victims. The voice of each Price daughter also becomes clear. Rachel, the eldest, is self-absorbed and materialistic. Leah is smart and the most sociable of the siblings - she worships her father even though they have blazing rows. Adah, her twin, is disabled since birth, and remains mostly silent, though we learn from her thoughts that her mind is sharp and poetic. Ruth May is only five years old, yet she can pick up on the worry and unease of her mother. Orleanna's account looks back on their life in Africa with sadness and regret, and hints at a major tragedy that befell the family during their stay.

The event, when it occurs, is indeed shocking. The story then proceeds for over 150 pages, and this is my one criticism of the book - it does feel a little long-winded. I suppose Kingsolver wanted to show how each of the Prices coped with such misfortune and moved on with their lives. However, this is a minor complaint. The Poisonwood Bible is one of those unforgettable reads. It examines weighty themes like race, religion and politics from so many angles and manages to wrap it all up into such a rich and compelling story. It's an ambitious, powerful yarn that Barbara Kingsolver spins and she pulls it off with real aplomb.

Brilliant!!

A review in quotes from the book:

I know how people are, with their habits of mind. Most will sail through from cradle to grave with a conscience clean as snow...I know people. Most have no earthly notion of the price of a snow-white conscience.

When the spirit passed through him he groaned, throwing body and soul into his weekly purge. The "Amen enema", as I call it. My palindrome for the Reverend.

He warned Mother not to flout God's Will by expecting too much of us."Sending a girl to college is like pouring water in your shoes,' he still loves to say, as often as possible. 'It's hard to say which is worse, seeing it run out and waste the water, or seeing it hold in and wreck the shoes.

I could never work out whether we were to view religion as a life-insurance policy or a life sentence. I can understand a wrathful God who'd just as soon dangle us all from a hook. And I can understand a tender, unprejudiced Jesus. But I could never quite feature the two of them living in the same house. You wind up walking on eggshells, never knowing which... is at home at the moment.

Tata Jesus is bangala!

Don't blame God for what ants have to do. We all get hungry. Congolese people are not so different from Congolese ants."

"They have to swarm over a village and eat other people alive?"

"When they are pushed down long enough they will rise up. If they bite you, they are trying to fix things in the only way they know.”

Live was I ere I saw evil

...trust in Creation which is made fresh daily and doesn’t suffer in translation. This God does not work in especially mysterious ways. The sun here rises and sets at six exactly. A caterpillar becomes a butterfly. A bird raises its brood in the forest and a greenheart tree will only grow from a greenheart seed. He brings drought sometimes followed by torrential rains and if these things aren’t always what I had in mind, they aren’t my punishment either. They’re rewards, let’s say for the patience of a seed.

On the day of the hunt I came to know in the slick center of my bones this one thing; all animals kill to survive, and we are animals. The lion kills the baboon, the baboon kills fat grasshoppers. The elephant tears up living trees, dragging their precious roots from the dirt they love....And we, even if we had no meat or even grass to gnaw, still boil our water to kill the invisible creatures that would like to kill us first. And swallow quinine pills. The death of something living is the price of our own survival, and we pay it again and again. We have no choice. It is the one solemn promise every life on earth is born and bound to keep.

It's frightening when things you love appear suddenly changed from what you have always known.

No other continent has endured such an unspeakably bizarre combination of foreign thievery and foreign goodwill.

But his kind will always lose in the end. I know this, and now I know why. Whether it's wife or nation they occupy, their mistake is the same: they stand still, and their stake moves underneath them.... Chains rattle, rivers roll, animals startle and bolt, forests inspire and expand, babies stretch open-mouthed from the womb, new seedlings arch their necks and creep forward into the light. Even a language won't stand still. A territory is only possessed for a moment in time. They stake everything on that moment, posing for photographs while planting the flag, casting themselves in bronze.... Even before the flagpole begins to peel and splinter, the ground underneath arches and slides forward into its own new destiny. It may bear the marks of boots on its back, but those marks become the possessions of the land.

History didn't cross my mind. Now it does. Now I know, whatever your burdens, to hold yourself apart from the lot of more powerful men is an illusion. On that awful day in January 1961, Lumumba paid with a life and so did I. On the wings of an owl the fallen Congo came to haunt even our little family, we messengers of goodwill adrift on a sea of mistaken intentions.

Poor Congo, barefoot bride of men who took her jewels and promised the Kingdom.

Don’t try to make life a mathematics problem with yourself in the center and everything coming out equal. When you’re good, bad things can still happen. And if you’re bad, you can still be lucky.

Sugar, it's no parade but you'll get down the street one way or another, so you'd just as well throw your shoulders back and pick up the pace.

Everything you're sure is right can be wrong in another place.

We used to be baffled by Kikongo words with so many different meanings: bangala, for most precious and most insufferable and also poisonwood. That one word brought down Father’s sermons every time, as he ended them all with the shout “Tata Jesus is bangala!”

Illusions mistaken for truth are the pavement under our feet. They are what we call civilization.

Shoes would interfere with her conversation, for she constantly addresses the ground under her feet. Asking forgiveness. Owning, disowning, recanting, recharting a hateful course of events to make sense of her complicity. We all are, I suppose. Trying to invent our version of the story. All human odes are essentially one. "My life: what I stole from history, and how I live with it.

Listen. To live is to be marked. To live is to change, to acquire the words of a story, and that is the only celebration we mortals really know. In perfect stillness, frankly, I've only found sorrow.

A choir of seedlings arching their necks out of rotted tree stumps, sucking life out of death. I am the forest's conscience, but remember, the forest eats itself and lives forever.

The power is in the balance: we are our injuries, as much as we are our successes.

Listened to the Audible version. This book is new among my all time favorites! Read it now!!!

5 impossibly brilliant stars

“The fallen Congo came to haunt even our little family, we messengers of goodwill adrift on a sea of mistaken intentions.”

(First read in 2002 or 2003; reread for book club and rating upped by 1 star.) Often I find that on a second reading a book doesn’t live up to my memory of it – last year I reread just four books, and I rated each one a star lower than I had the first time. But that wasn’t the case with my September book club book, which I’ve just flown through in 11 days. Maybe it’s that I’d allowed enough time to pass for it to be almost completely fresh, or that I was in a better frame of mind to appreciate its picture of harmful ideologies in a postcolonial setting. In any case, this time it struck me as a masterpiece, and has instantly leapt onto my favorites list.

Here’s the sum total of what I’d remembered about The Poisonwood Bible after the passage of 16–17 years:

It’s about a missionary family in Africa, and narrated by the daughters.

One of the sisters marries an African.

The line “Nathan was made frantic by sex” (except I had it fixed incorrectly in my mind; it’s actually “Nathan was made feverish by sex”).


Everything else I’d forgotten. Here’s what stood out on my second reading:

Surely one of the best opening lines ever? (Though technically there’s a prologue that comes before it.) “We came from Bethlehem, Georgia, bearing Betty Crocker cake mixes into the jungle.”

The book is actually narrated in turns by the wife and four daughters of Southern Baptist missionary Nathan Price, who arrives in the Congo with his family in 1959. These five voices are a triumph of first-person narration, so distinct and arising organically from the characters’ personalities and experiences. The mother, Orleanna, writes from the future in despondent isolation – a hint right from the beginning that this venture is not going to end well. Fifteen-year-old Rachel is a selfish, ditzy blonde who speaks in malapropisms and period slang and misses everything about American culture. Leah, one of the 13-year-olds, is whip-smart and earnest; she idolizes their father and echoes his religious language. Her twin, Adah, who was born with partial paralysis, rarely speaks but has an intricate inner life she expresses through palindromes, cynical poetry and plays on words. And Ruth May, just five years old, sees more than she understands and sets it all across plainly but wittily.

Nathan’s arrogant response to the ‘native customs’ is excruciating. His first prayer, spoken to bless the meal the people of Kilanga give in welcome, quickly becomes a diatribe against nakedness, and he later rails against polygamy and witch doctors and tries to enforce child baptism. When he refuses to take their housekeeper Mama Tataba’s advice on planting, all of the seeds he brought from home wash away in the first rainstorm. On a second attempt he meekly makes the raised beds she recommended, and keeps away from the poisonwood that made him break out in a nasty rash. This garden he plants is a metaphor for control versus adaptation.

Brother Fowles, Nathan’s predecessor at the mission, is proof that Christianity doesn’t have to be a haughty rampage. He respects Africans enough to have married one, and his religion is a playful, elastic one built around love and working alongside creation.

The King James Bible (plus Apocrypha, for which Nathan harbors a strange fondness) provides much of the book’s language and imagery, as well as the section headings. Many of these references come to have (sometimes mocking) relevance. Kingsolver also makes reference to classics of Africa-set fiction, like Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart and Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness.

Africa is a place of many threats – malaria and dysentery, snakes in the chicken house, swarms of ants that eat everything in their path, corruption, political coups and assassinations – not least the risk of inadvertently causing grave cultural offense.

The backdrop of the Congo’s history, especially the declaration of independence in 1960 and the U.S.-led “replacement” (by assassination) of its first prime minister, Patrice Lumumba, with the dictator Mobutu, is thorough but subtle, such that minimal to no Googling is required to understand the context. (Only in one place, when Leah and Rachel are arguing as adults, does Kingsolver resort to lecturing on politics through dialogue, as she does so noticeably in Unsheltered.)

Names are significant, as are their changes. With the end of colonialism Congo becomes Zaire and all its cities and landmarks are renamed, but the change seems purely symbolic. The characters take on different names in the course of the book, too, through nicknames, marriage or education. Many African words are so similar to each other that a minor mispronunciation by a Westerner changes the meaning entirely, making for jokes or irony. And the family’s surname is surely no coincidence: we are invited to question the price they have paid by coming to Africa.

We follow the sisters decades into the future. “Africa has a thousand ways to get under your skin,” Leah writes; “we’ve all ended up giving up body and soul to Africa, one way or another.” Three of the four end up staying there permanently, but disperse into different destinies that seem to fit their characters. Even those Prices who return to the USA will never outrun the shadow the Congo has left on their lives.


What an amazing novel about the ways that right and wrong, truth and pain get muddied together. Some characters are able to acknowledge their mistakes and move on, while others never can. As Adah concludes, “We are the balance of our damage and our transgressions.”

The mark of success of a doorstopper for me is that it’s so engrossing you hardly notice how long it is. I think this will make for our best book club discussion yet. I can already think of a few questions to ask – Is it fair that Nathan never gets to tell his side of the story? Which of the five voices is your favorite? Who changes and who stays the same over the course of the book? – and I’m sure I’ll find many more resources online since this was an Oprah’s Book Club pick too.


Originally published on my blog, Bookish Beck.


[English singer-songwriter Anne-Marie Sanderson’s excellent Book Songs, Volume 1 EP includes the song “Poisonwood”. The excerpted lyrics are below, with direct quotes from the text in bold.

Our Father speaks for all of us
Our Father knows what’s best for us as well

He planted a garden where poisonwood grew
He cut down the orchids cos none of us knew
that the seeds that filled his pockets
would grow and grow without stopping
his beans, his Kentucky Wonders
played their part in tearing us asunder.

Our mother suffered through all of this
Our mother carried the guilt
Carry us, marry us, ferry us, bury us
Carry us, bury us with the poisonwood.]

Thoughts on the book itself:
- Especially in the later chapters, Rachel bothered me deeply. How do you go from growing up in the Congo to just pushing it all away again and acting the way she did? (Privilege, of course.) I don't understand her. (I do but I don't like it.) Leah and Adah (and even Orleanna) made a lot more sense to me.
- Reverend Price reminded me of the American adventure blogger incident in 2018
- I lovelovelove Anatole and Brother Fowles

This book was published in the late 90s and the storyline spanned from 1959 to the 1980s. And it still feels so incredibly, infuriatingly relevant in 2020.

Memories I'll hold onto from/while reading this:
- Reading on the porch in the sticky July heat while the cats either nap or chase squirrels and birds #Summer2020
- Waylon catching his first bird E V E R
- No rain for two weeks and then the night I finished this, there was a massive downpour

Thus she had lain
sugarcane sweet
deserts her hair
golden her feet
mountains her breasts
two Niles her tears.
Thus she has lain
Black through the years.

Over the white seas
rime white and cold
brigands ungentled
icicle bold
took her young daughters
sold her strong sons
churched her with Jesus
bled her with guns.
Thus she has lain.

Now she is rising
remember her pain
remember the losses
her screams loud and vain
remember her riches
her history slain
now she is striding
although she had lain.

-tMaya Angelou, ‘Africa’

When the missionaries came to Africa they had the Bible and we had the land. They said 'Let us pray.' We closed our eyes. When we opened them we had the Bible and they had the land.

-tBishop Demond Tutu

There are certain books which hit you with the force of a sledgehammer, rearranging your worldview in such a way that once you put down the book, you are a changed person. They need not necessarily be edifying or uplifting: in fact, they can be dispiriting and downright distressing – yet they won’t let you go. The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver is a book like that.

On the surface, this is the tragic story of the frightening disintegration of the family of Nathaniel Price, Baptist minister on an evangelical mission in the Belgian Congo at the beginning of the 1960’s. Congo is on the verge of independence: Belgium, after having bled the country dry, is about to run away as colonialism has become a loss-making proposition. In a turbulent country filled with poisonous flora and fauna, and a suspicious and hostile people, Reverend Price has his work cut out. In an out-and-out battle with the pagan forces which control the land, expecting Jesus to win out is foolish; this is clear to all except the preacher. So as he tries to save souls, his wife Orleanna is on a mission to save her sanity and her four daughters – the self-centred and vain Rachel, the twins Leah (earnest and religious) and Adah (handicapped and secretive), and the baby of the lot, Ruth May, a free spirit most in tune with the wild countryside.

As Belgium goes away, Congo becomes independent under President Patrice Lumumba – then the inevitable happens. America, panicky about a possible “socialist” takeover, sets about overthrowing the nascent democracy and installing a puppet dictator, Mbotu, in place of Lumumba who is imprisoned and cruelly murdered. While all this was happening, Nathan Price’s authority is also challenged by the village headman, Tata Ndu, as Jesus is “voted out” in preference for the local tribal deities during morning mass: and on January 17, 1961, unspeakable tragedy visits the Price family in the form of death of one of the children. Feeling that enough is enough, Orleanna moves out with her remaining daughters, leaving Nathan to preach in the wilderness. The remaining part of the novel traces their life journey through two continents and four countries.

***

All good writing uses metaphor to a great extent – this is what separates the excellent from the pedestrian. However, to carry it off for the whole length of 600+ page novel without losing your readers is a great achievement. That is what the author has done effortlessly here.

”Tata Jesus is Bängala!” Shouts Nathan Price from the pulpit – little knowing that Bängala in the local tongue, meaning “precious and dear” when pronounced in a certain way, means poisonwood – the local tree which attacks the skin with itches – the way he pronounces it. And therein begins the disconnect. A desert religion under a fierce God who is not beyond murdering his children for disobedience (for it is the Old Testament God which Nathan prays to, not the God of Love of Jesus, even though he pretends it is) in confrontation with a pagan one, in which everything is connected, everything is alive, death being only a matter of perception. A language in which there is a meaning enforced on each word, in confrontation with a language without a script, where the way sounds are made can make profound changes to meaning. A culture which extols exploitation of nature in the name of religion, in confrontation with a culture which adapts itself to it.

And Christianity itself is not without contradictions. Anyone who has read the Bible can see that the Ogre God of the Old Testament has no relation to Jesus’s God of Love. As Orleanna says:

n  I can understand a wrathful God who’d just as soon dangle us all from a hook. And I can understand a tender, unprejudiced Jesus. But I could never quite feature the two of them living in the same house.n

There is no doubt who Nathan’s God is. In fact, his house is a microcosm of the world as imagined by the Old Testament – he is Our Father, who disburses harsh punishments even for the smallest transgressions, and his wife and four children are his subjects and apostles. And his story becomes the Poisonwood Bible.

In true Biblical fashion, the tale is narrated by the apostles – each one’s gospel narrating the same events with differing points of view. Here the author has outdone herself, as we see the same events through different lenses – allowing us to ponder more on the hidden meanings that lie beneath the still surface. Orleanna, talking from the future with hindsight, gives the overview of each section – which is then narrated by the four daughters in turn. Rachel, totally self-centred, can give only a superficial account (and many a time, subject to horrible malapropisms); Leah is forthright, honest and scrupulously fair (she is also the most obedient and religious); Adah, her crippled twin (who doesn’t speak) has the most disturbing inner vision – a sort of sacred madness; and Mary Ruth, the youngest, who has the most Afro-centric vision.

The novel is structured in sections roughly corresponding to their Biblical counterparts – only, their order is jumbled. Thus, we have Revelation directly after Genesis and Exodus towards the end. The overall effect is satisfactorily scriptural. There are many scenes of mythical intensity: the plague of the killer ants, the forest fire and the ritual hunt, and rain which follows the practically sacrificial death of a child. The slow move towards doom is effectively foreshadowed, and the tragedy at the end has all the trappings of ritual. Especially, Nathan walking around baptising children attending the funeral of his daughter in the pouring rain, is loaded with tragic irony.

In parallel to this tale, the distressing tale of Congo (and Africa in general), unfolds. But unlike the Prices, some of whom at least find peace in their life, the continent is still far away from that ideal.

Adah says:

n  Misunderstanding is my cornerstone. It’s everyone’s, come to think of it. Illusions mistaken for truth are the pavement under our feet. They are what we call civilization. n

Wandering through the Congo along with the Prices, where all that is being (living, dead, inanimate and incorporeal) are the same (ntu), given life by nommo, the word, it is easy to believe that.

This is my favorite book. Hands down. There is something about this book that strongly affects me every single time I read it. I have read it maybe 8 times. The first time I read it, it was while working in a coffee shop. It was supposed to be my "break time" reading, but I am sure I nearly got fired that week, because I couldn't put it down.

The book is told from the point of view of the Price women, four sisters and their mother, who have all been brought to the Belgian Congo by Rev. Price, an Evengelical Baptist minister, determined to bring the word of God to the African savages, no matter what the cost. The family and their mission begin to dissolve as the Belgians pull out of Africa, leaving severe political unrest in their wake, unrest driven by the CIA and the US government. We see the family struggle to survive and cope with their faith; faith in God, in each other, in their country and in justice.

Kingsolver's strength in this novel is her point of view narration and the way each of the five female voices sound completely different, yet enough similarities exist to believe they are all related. As the daughter of a minister myself, I strongly identified with Leah, but I also enjoyed Adah's, her twin sister, point of view. The counterpoints of Leah's positive, hopefulness is juxtoposed nicely by her sister, who was crippled at birth, who speaks in rhymes and palindromes and sees the dark side of everything.

The relationship between mothers and daughters, and between sisters is strongly explored. We also see each of the girls chasing after their father's approval, which is nearly impossibe to gain. Each of the Price's learn something valuable from the dark continent, though some learn it more grudgingly than others. The book definetly increased my interest in the parts of African history that no one teaches you in high school, mostly how Western nations used the contient like a giant chess board, moving pawns and unseating democratically elected socialists in favor of capitalists willing to sell them raw materials cheap.

Five stars. All the way.