Hearts of Darkness

By John Skow

A forest: monkeys, army ants, poisonous frogs. Below, on a path, a woman and four girls, all in shirtwaist dresses. "Seen from above this way," writes novelist Barbara Kingsolver at the outset of The Poisonwood Bible (HarperCollins; 546 pages; $26), "they are pale, doomed blossoms, bound to appeal to your sympathies. Be careful. Later on you'll have to decide what sympathy they deserve." Fair warning, though what the reader must decide before finishing this turbulent, argumentative narrative goes beyond judging four white American daughters and their mother, set down deep in the Congo in the precarious year 1959.

What follows would shame the gods, if any were paying attention. Here's the mother, back in the U.S., in old age: "Now that every turn in the weather whistles an ache through my bones, I stir in bed and the memories rise out of me like a buzz of flies from a carcass." The memories, eloquently relived and regretted, are of grotesque cultural arrogance, unraveling in a very small place. Rumblings of the Congo's struggle for independence from Belgium--and U.S. plotting to assassinate Patrice Lumumba, the new nation's first Prime Minister--are distant thunder in Kingsolver's tale. Her story, a symbolic parallel to the national upheaval, takes place in an isolated village. Nathan Price, an evangelical Baptist preacher, fanaticism in bitter parody, lugs his wife, daughters and rigid preconceptions to Kilanga, a small jungle settlement, where faith plays out as farce. To the hospitable but puzzled tribesmen, he rails against nakedness and multiple wives, and he insists on river baptisms though crocodiles lurk in the river. Fittingly, though he does not understand this, the Congolese word batiza means both baptism and, pronounced differently, terrify. Worse, "Tata Jesus is bangala," as Price mispronounces it, means not Father Jesus is precious but Father Jesus is a poisonwood tree.

The preacher is an engine driving the novel toward chaos, a man who obstinately and relentlessly refuses to change ideas that do not suit the time or place. But in terms of portraiture, he is a stick figure, dismissed by his older daughters as "Our Father." Mother and daughters, on the other hand, are fully drawn. As the months go by, they come to understand what Price cannot, and they tell their stories in sharply distinct voices. Orleanna, the mother, at first an obedient 1950s wife who does not question bringing salvation to the heathens, struggles with remorse in her musings years later: "You'll say I walked across Africa with my wrists unshackled, and now I am one more soul walking free in a white skin." Sixteen-year-old Rachel, a teen queen who yearns for pop music and beauty aids, squawks, "Jeez oh man, wake me up when it's over." Ruth May, who is six and fearless, plays mother-may-I? with the village kids.

But a pair of 14-year-old identical twins, Leah and Adah, are the author's most vivid characters. Leah is a thoughtful, idealistic beauty who at first idolizes her father, then sees through his pious bluster. Adah, crippled at birth, is a wry, inward-turning genius who refuses to speak but silently reshapes the world in bitter palindromes: "amen enema," and "evil, all; its sin is still alive."

A writer who casts a preacher as a fool and a villain had best not be preachy. Kingsolver manages not to be, in part because she is a gifted magician of words--her sleight-of-phrase easily distracting a reader who might be on the point of rebellion. Her novel is both powerful and quite simple. It is also angrier and more direct than her earlier books, Animal Dreams and Pigs in Heaven, in which social issues involving Native Americans remained mostly in the background. The clear intent of The Poisonwood Bible is to offer Nathan Price's patriarchal troublemaking as an example in miniature of historical white exploitation of black Africa. Kingsolver, 43, lived in the Congo in the early '60s, and fondly remembers the people and the terrain. But this is a novel, not travel writing salted with guilt. The author's strong female characterizations carry a story that moves through its first half like a river in flood.

It must be said that Kingsolver's men are less interesting. One male African teacher, in particular, is so patient and virtuous that he seems--cultural bias alert here--almost Christlike. Perhaps that is because unlike the women, whose thoughts we hear, the men are observed only from the outside. It is also true that the novel's second half is subdued in tone. The author has made her point, and the rest is told almost as afterword. The rapacious Mobutu Sese Seko is in power, thanks to U.S. influence. And the Price women, their calamitous adventure mostly behind them, do what people do: get married, or not; follow a profession, or not; grow older.