Lyn's Reviews > The Poisonwood Bible

What is amazing about The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver is the author’s voice.

Kingsolver casts a spell with the language she uses to describe three decades in the collective lives of the Price family, beginning with their time as missionaries in the Belgian Congo.

The structure is also a strength. The story is narrated by the mother and daughters of the Price family, each illustrating her perspective of the family chronicle as they experience what would become and what really began as an ill-fated mission. The ending family is a mirror image of the beginning, Leah Price and her four sons serving as the anti-missionary to Nathan Price’s strict and misguided zealotry.

Kingsolver’s imagery is reminiscent of Faulkner’s families, and it may be a silent nod to the Nobel Prize winner to have Orleana Price come from Mississippi. The reader cannot help but be reminded of William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury and especially As I Lay Dying, redolent by the altering perspectives of the characters narrative. Kingsolver also masterfully explores many Faulkneresque themes such as family, legacy, racism, guilt, and connections to land.

The author also depicts and expounds upon themes of motherhood, parent child relationships, feminism, colonial arrogance and forgiveness. Running in a current throughout the novel is religion and how Christianity blends and conflicts with animist theology. The Poisonwood Bible also records the history of colonial Congo as it transitions briefly to independence and then to a subjugation of another kind, while also spending some time with the economics of the Rumble in the Jungle between Muhammad Ali and George Foreman.

What I cannot like about the book, and what becomes a fundamental, and distractingly unnecessary flaw is the lack of objective balance. Kingsolver is clearly critical of the Christian mission and Western capitalism, and her argument is persuasive. There is no doubt that Western influences, from colonial Belgium to CIA interference to capitalistic excesses have caused devastating problems in the region. What is maddening about the narrative is Kingsolver’s use of straw man arguments, when she does not need to! She has made her point and well, so refusing to even acknowledge a counter argument weakens her otherwise powerful reasoning.

The characters Nathan and Rachel Price are unnecessarily one-dimensional. She provides an intriguing back-story to explain some of Nathan’s neurosis but uses him simply as a foil to Leah’s development and as an inverse example of her pragmatic spirituality. Rachel’s character is really a caricature, almost a comic relief, and this glaring juxtaposition to Ada’s allegorical maturity further diminishes Kingsolver’s otherwise impressive artistic achievement.

Still, these flaws are far from fatal and Barbara Kingsolver has created a memorable work.

** 2018 addendum - it is a testament to great literature that a reader recalls the work years later and this is a book about which I frequently think. Excellent.