22 December 2016
The Poisonwood Bible
by Barbara Kingsolver
Reviewed by Lynda Goetz
This is a book I originally read over ten years ago. It was first published in 1998 and has been a bestseller ever since on both sides of the Atlantic. Set in the 1960s, it tells the story of an American missionary family’s stay in Africa, and of the tragedies which result from the clash of two very different cultures. The arrogance and intransigence of the father, Nathan Price, a preacher who rules his family with excessive, indeed abusive, discipline and the threat of a most unsympathetic God is well-portrayed. The effect of his arrival on the local villagers, whose understanding of life is so far removed from his own, makes riveting reading when he attempts to impose his own brand of brimstone and hellfire without any regard for their traditions. As with all well-written tragedies, the sense of danger and doom is ever-present.
The story is told through the eyes of all the female members of the Price family i.e. the preacher’s wife and his four daughters, on all of whom the stay in the Congo has profound and disastrous effects. The application of the individual to the general is never far from the surface. Barbara Kinsgolver’s own time spent in the Congo as a child may well have sparked the idea for the setting (the same incidentally as Conrad’s Heart of Darkness) but as she has pointed out, the book was 30 years in the gestation and those years of evolution and the author’s ability as a writer result in a very well-researched and extremely thought-provoking book.
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