Ron Peters's Reviews > The Poisonwood Bible

This is one of the better novels I’ve read in the last several years, about colonialism and postcolonialism in the former Belgian Congo mainly in the 1950s and Sixties. Although all this sneaks up on you, you learn about colonialism from the religious, military, political, and corporate perspectives, including CIA meddling. It introduces you to life in the villages and cities, and the role of American and European foreigners of all kinds.

I had never read anything by Kingsolver and didn’t know anything about the book. At first, I had no idea what I was reading, and I wasn’t sure I liked it, but the book quickly brought me around.

I realized what I was reading was a story told in the voices of the four young daughters of Nathan Price, a rigid, domineering, angry evangelical Baptist who took a job no one wanted, and that others had abandoned, as a missionary in a small Congolese village. Willy-nilly he dragged his family along with him. The nation itself was on the verge of liberation and civil war.

One girl is a young child who plays with the village children and runs around in the jungle. Two others are twins, but one had been injured in childbirth. Many people believe her to be mentally deficient, but you discover that she is by far the most intelligent person in the family. The third daughter starts off close to her father and wants to be like him, but slowly turns against him. The fourth daughter is a hilarious ninny with no interests except the consumerism she cannot engage in in the jungle, and how her hair-do is holding up. You learn about the views of the villagers and events in the nation obliquely through the reactions of the girls.

Small parts of the story are told by the mother, but most of the story is told by the girls, who give you their individual perspectives on their unique life, their father, the beliefs of the local people, Congolese politics as is scarcely understood in that remote region, and so on.

I thought more could have been done with the character of the father to complicate him even slightly, but Kingsolver made a clear choice to not do this. I also thought that the book could have ended sooner, after the family broke up and the daughters dispersed around the world, with a kind of “where are they now” ending, but the book is still thoroughly excellent, and I would like to try another Kingsolver novel at some point.