Carolyn Piper
Copyright 2002
The Poisonwood Bible
By Barbara Kingsolver
543 pages
Harper Perennial
Reading Rock Tears
If we are lucky one book will come along in our lifetimes that
touches us so deeply, and so profoundly, that we can hardly speak
of it with lucidity. I have always loved books, and taken joy
in reading, but when a friend of mine asked me if I had ever encountered
such a book in my life, I came up mostly empty. I cited Agamemnon,
which contains an end scene which never fails to shake me to my
core. But I knew he wasn't talking about just one scene, powerful
though it might be. He meant a total experience with a work that
in its entirety, leaves you changed in ways you cannot quite put
your finger on, standing back with awe, emotions rubbed raw. He
told me of his experience of reading Lord Jim in college,
which moved him so much that he broke into tears in his final
exam while writing an essay on it. I envied him that, and I wondered
what it would be like to encounter such a work.
The Posionwood Bible is just such a book for me.
Like most important events in life, finding this work was a matter of serendipity. I had joined a sign language class that met a couple times a month, and one night one of the other members, knowing me for the avid reader I am, came to the class with a book under her arm. "Here," she said, sliding the volume across the table towards me. "You have to read this." I looked down and saw The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver and I cringed. I had tried to read Kingsolver previously, most notably Animal Dreams, and had been unable to get interested or involved in her prose. Stupidly perhaps, I gave up on this author following that last failure. Now, riffling through the pages of Poisonwood, I could see no reason that this book would prove to be different, and I tried to put Alyson off. "No," she said firmly. "I know you. You MUST read this." More out of politeness than conviction, I took it from her and stuck in on a table, privately having no intention of doing any such thing.
And there it sat for a good long time. Finally one day, at loose ends, and out of anything else to read, convinced I would hate it but at least I could, after a decent interval, honestly tell Alyson I had tried, I picked it up and began the first chapter. It begins:
Imagine a ruin so strange it must never have happened.
FIrst picture the forest. I want you to be its conscience, the eyes in the trees. The trees are columns of slick, brindled bark like muscular animals overgrown beyond all reason. Every space is clutched in copulation, secreting their precious eggs onto dripping leaves. The breathing of monkeys. A glide of snake belly on branch. A single file of ants biting a mammoth tree into uniform grains and hauling it down to the dark for their ravenous queen. And, in reply, a choir of seedlings arching their necks out of rotted tree stumps, sucking life out of death. The forest eats itself and lives forever.
I was hooked.
The Poisonwood Bible is nominally the tale of a missionary couple with four daughters who travel to the Belgian Congo on the eve of its independence. In reality, it is story of human lives run amok in an alien land. The story is told in turn by the mother, and each of the daughters, each of whom has their own distinctive voice and presence: five year old Ruth, 14 year old Rachel and the 13 year old twins, Adda and Leah, one of whom, having sustained damage at birth, is crippled in body, but not in mind. Each character brings her unique viewpoint to their situation-- surrounded as they are by an alien culture, and ruled by the iron fist of their dogmatically fundamentalist father, who brooks no dissent from either his family-or God Himself for that matter, let alone those he has come to minister to. The result is, of course, a catastrophe, which mirrors the upheaval that overtakes the land they had so egotistically come to salvage. Good and evil, hate and love, health and sickness and death, and the blind chance of fate are unloosed and explored in almost biblical proportions, as indeed Kingsolver is almost at pains to point out by utilizing biblical chapter headings, and by its end, I knew intimately the tears that my friend, for his own reasons, had shed over Lord Jim.
I finished the book sitting on my favorite rock in the woods, pencil in hand-for with books such as this one, I am lost without a pencil to underline what jumps off the page at me. And when I finished the last sentence I began to cry. For the pity, and waste, and harm and pain that we human inflict on each other. But also for the triumph and redemption that is our birthright if we are but willing to claim it from within. This I though, THIS is MY Lord Jim. NOW I understand.
Posionwood Bible is a powerful tale. It is written in as eloquent and lyrical language as I have ever encountered. And if the second half of the book is not quite of the quality of the first, where Africa is literally brought to life-- we can see almost smell and feel it, along with the characters, it is nonetheless a haunting experience of sin and redemption, and the terrible price we all pay when we lose sight of the commonality of our humanity.
I would love to hear from any of you who also have a book that has touched you, as this one did me. If you send me titles and brief descriptions of what your book means to you, I will include them in our next issue. I look forward to hearing from you. Write to me at wicwas@wcvt.com.
Happy reading!
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