Before I read The Poisonwood Bible (Barbara Kingsolver, Faber & Faber, 1999), I wasn't really interested in Africa - the conflicts, catastrophes and corruption endlessly played out in the same places with different names by fancifully titled armies and medal-festooned dictators. Kingsolver's book, written with a sort of religious fervour, has created something of a conversion.
Kingsolver's story is breathtaking in its depth and breadth. She tells the story of a region and an era through the eyes and voices of four daughters and their mother, roped together by the fierce will of husband and father Nathan Price, an American missionary who resettles his family in the Belgian Congo in 1959.
At first, the girls see and interpret their new world like children, up close and personal; the deprivation and dignity, the jungle beautiful and perilous by turns, their father's proselytising, shading from comical to sinister. Natural calamity and personal tragedy brings childhood to an end and divides the family for ever.
With Kingsolver's genius, these distinctive personalities grow up under our eyes, each faithfully retaining her individual voice as Africa shapes their disparate futures. The girls and their mother each seek to reconcile their African experience and make peace with the past, the girls' adult lives a natural flowering of what we saw in their childhood.
For a few days after I read The Poisonwood Bible, I found myself eating more gratefully, working with less complaint, and even reading or viewing Africa's issues with less insouciance. The girls are still in my thoughts as if I might really pass them tomorrow morning on the red dirt path through the village, in a Congo and an Africa that has taken on a new colour and depth for me.
