The Poisonwood Bible

 The Poisonwood Bible

By Barbara Kingsolver

I came across this book in the little free library at the Plymouth Schoolhouse; it was one of the few texts

there that seemed worth reading, so I thought I'd pick it up.

The book tells the story of an American family who, at the insistence of the father, fly to the Belgian Congo to do missionary work. It is a doomed mission. The father, a preacher before World War II, emerged from the conflict a zealot, convinced that he needed to make up for his fortuitous injury that helped him miss the Bataan Death March in which nearly all of his fellow soldiers died. 

The rest of the family, a woman and four girls, are less dedicated. They all react to the relocation in different ways, and take turns narrating chapters. My favorites were Rachel, a vapid teacher whose writing was filled with humorous malapropisms, and Ada, a selective mute with a disability, who copes with her place in the world with word play and Emily Dickinson. 

The patriarch is stereotypically dismissive of the culture he finds in his new home. He, for instance, doesn't bother to learn that the native language is tonal -- the meaning of words changes based on how they are said. Which is how the book gets its name. The father, thinking he is trying to say something else, inadvertently calls his holy book "poisonwood", which is symbolic of the challenges he faces in converting the Congolese people.

Things take a turn for the worse for the family when an independence movement, led by Patrice Lumumba, successfully frees the Congo from Belgian rule. Though other local missionaries plead for the family to leave, the father, haunted by his wartime past, refuses. The family is cut off from their meager stipend, which still made them the richest people in their village, and, as the father takes long walks working on sermons few people will hear and fewer will understand, the women of the family are more or less left to figure out how to survive on their own. Eventually, they flee. Or three of them do. Leah falls in love with a local teacher, whose participation in the independence movement becomes problematic when a US-backed coup leads to the murder of Lumumba and the rise of a despot bent on enriching himself and silencing his rivals.

Overall, the book was interesting -- but far too long.