Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1210 in Books
• Published on: 2000-01-10
• Binding: Paperback
• 626 pages

Amazon.co.uk Review
As any reader of The Mosquito Coast knows, men who drag their families to far-off climes in pursuit of an Idea seldom come to any good, while those familiar with At Play in the Fields of the Lord or Kalimantaan understand that the minute a missionary sets foot on the fictional stage, all hell is about to break loose. So when Barbara Kingsolver sends missionary Nathan Price along with his wife and four daughters off to Africa in The Poisonwood Bible, you can be sure that salvation is the one thing they're not likely to find. The year is 1959 and the place is the Belgian Congo. Nathan, a Baptist preacher, has come to spread the Word in a remote village reachable only by airplane. To say that he and his family are woefully unprepared would be an understatement: "We came from Bethlehem, Georgia, bearing Betty Crocker cake mixes into the jungle," says Leah, one of Nathan's four daughters. But of course it isn't long before they discover that the tremendous humidity has rendered the mixes unusable, their clothes are unsuitable and they've arrived in the middle of political upheaval as the Congolese seek to wrest independence from Belgium. In addition to poisonous snakes, dangerous animals, and the hostility of the villagers to Nathan's fiery take-no-prisoners brand of Christianity, there are also rebels in the jungle and the threat of war in the air. Could things get any worse?

In fact they can and they do. The first part of The Poisonwood Bible revolves around Nathan's intransigent, bullying personality and his effect on both his family and on the village they have come to. As political instability grows in the Congo, so does the local witch doctor's animus toward the Prices, and both seem to converge with tragic consequences about halfway through the novel. From that point on, the family is dispersed and the novel follows each member's fortunes across a span of more than 30 years.

The Poisonwood Bible is arguably Barbara Kingsolver's most ambitious work, and it reveals both her great strengths and her weaknesses. As Nathan Price's wife and four daughters tell their story in alternating chapters, Kingsolver does a good job of differentiating the voices. But at times they can grate--teenaged Rachel's tendency towards precious malapropisms is particularly annoying (students practice their "French congregations"; Nathan's refusal to take his family home is a "tapestry of justice"). More problematic is Kingsolver's tendency to wear her politics on her sleeve; this is particularly evident in the second half of the novel, in which she uses her characters as mouthpieces to explicate the complicated and tragic history of the Belgian Congo.

Despite these weaknesses, Kingsolver's fully realised, three-dimensional characters make The Poisonwood Bible compelling, especially in the first half when Nathan Price is still at the centre of the action. And in her treatment of Africa and the Africans she is at her best, exhibiting the acute perception, moral engagement and lyrical prose that has made her previous novels so successful. --Alix Wilber, Amazon.com

Synopsis
This is a story told by the wife and four daughters of Nathan Price, a fierce evangelical Baptist who takes his family and mission to the Belgian Congo in 1959.

Customer Reviews

fantastic
getting into the book can take awhile but once your in you cant stop, read the whole book in 10 days

Brilliant - Colonialism & Humanity laid bare
Came across this book through another bood I'd read re the Congo and decided to give it a go. It was unputdownable. A story told through the eys of the 4 girls and their mother about their father's zealous Baptist mission to save the people of the Congo. The book encapsulates everything which is wrong with organised religion and significantly the flaws in colonial and post-colonial foreign policy. The fact that it achieves all of this without providing a moral lecture makes it all the more brilliant.

The story traces the pre-independence days and the post independence days and the battle for the "modern" white missionaries to survive in the primitive Congo a place which asks them to convert when what they have been sent there to do is to convert the Congo.

Your emotions for the protagonists vary from warmth and empathy to despising their very actions. It's a story that has no Hollywood ending in which good triumphs over evil because in the Congo there are varying degrees of good and varying degrees of evil and what is good now may be evil at another time.

Lovely!
This is one of those books that i've had on my shelf for an age and everytime I attempt to read it I just can't get into it. Luckily I tried again recently and I am so thankful that I did.
What a lovely book. Please read this!
The only judgement is that it really could have ended 3/4 of the way through, it seemed that it was merging into another book altogether towards the end. But nontheless I rate this very highly and it's definitely a book, and there are not many, that I will read several times throughout my life.