The Poisonwood Bible

by Beverly Tjerngren

At the beginning of the year, I ambitiously set out a list of ten books that I resolved to read by year's end. I got something of a slow start, taking months to struggle through the first book, One Hundred Years of Solitude, and once I was finished I had a hard time motivating myself to get going on the book I'd decided was next, The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver. It turns out, however, that I oughtn't have felt daunted by the book's thickness, as it was a fairly quick read that kept my mind engaged from the first chapter to the last.

The Poisonwood Bible is the story of a volatile Southern Baptist preacher-turned-missionary who removes his family from the comforts of Bethlehem, Georgia to a small jungle village in the Belgian Congo in the summer of 1959. The novel is told in the words of the preacher's wife and his four young daughters, ranging in age from five to fifteen, and in the main this is an effective narrative technique. Aside from eldest daughter Rachel's tendency toward precious and often-grating malapropisms, Kingsolver does a fine job of using the five different voices to flesh out what could otherwise have been a dry and cumbersome storyline.

While personal histories often take center stage in The Poisonwood Bible, this book is as much a lesson in the history of the modern political strife of Central Africa as it is the story of a family in turmoil, and it was that aspect more than any other that captured my attention. It is shameful, really, how little we in the West are taught about the realities of life on the so-called "dark continent" and our leaders' and nations' -- thus our own -- complicity in the unspeakable conditions so many continue to endure there. The most valuable thing I took from The Poisonwood Bible, I think, was the realization of how little I know about Africa and the resultant desire to learn more. With that, Kingsolver has achieved what I expect was her objective in writing this ambitious novel.