The Poisonwood Bible

The Poi­son­wood Bible con­tains as much phi­los­ophy as plot and descrip­tion, and they are so tightly wound that it’s dif­fi­cult to iso­late only one facet. Nonethe­less, here’s what I liked best:

• The intri­cate col­o­niza­tion metaphor, which is mul­ti­plied on every level: the family, the vil­lage, the country, Africa, the tyran­nical way our own thoughts col­o­nize our lives, and the hard­ship of rev­o­lu­tion on all fronts.
• From the omni­scient eyes in the trees, to Ada’s cere­bral assess­ments of her predica­ments, there is a depth of thought and intel­li­gence I rarely read in fic­tion (although I am trying to branch out…)
• Each of the dif­ferent voices is unique, espe­cially by the end of the novel, when each woman has grown firmly into her own per­son­ality. Ruth and Ada’s first chap­ters were espe­cially effec­tive for being quirky and enjoy­able, while Rachel’s last chap­ters were effec­tive for the oppo­site reason.
• As a child, I was no stranger to the oppres­sive, fanat­ical Bap­tist reli­gion por­trayed in the book, and for a short time I lived under the tyranny of an equally cruel step­fa­ther. The family dynamic in the book felt familiar, and gave the whole thing an air of authen­ticity for me.

This story was rewarding, but exhausting. In many ways, it was like spending time with a friend who cannot stop talking, but you listen because they’re intel­li­gent and interesting.

Specif­i­cally, the prose has a manic inten­sity that I found dis­tracting, mostly because the book is so charged and sym­bolic that descrip­tion for its own sake felt extra­neous to me — but that is just my taste; I am often con­tent to read:

She crossed the room and picked up the walking stick.

rather than:

Her foot­steps tapped like a spring rain as she crossed the aged cedar base­boards and retrieved the knotted cane from its bed of dust in the corner.

I’m unde­cided about the plot struc­ture. On the one hand, the main plot ends after 300 pages or so, leaving over 200 pages of seem­ingly end­less epi­logue, but this gives the text an under­cur­rent of will­ful­ness. These people sur­vive and per­sist, as life per­sists long after the events that shape us have hap­pened, and this book is as much about the recovery as the incident.

Overall, I feel more informed and per­haps a little wiser for reading it, which is to say that I was momen­tarily ush­ered into a for­eign arena about which I know very little, and now, I have that to con­sider too.

One last note: I lis­tened to the audio­book, and one acting choice stood out; The more racist, mis­in­formed, and stupid a cer­tain char­acter became, the more pro­nounced her southern accent became, and the oppo­site was true for those char­ac­ters who grew wiser and gained a better under­standing of the world. Being from Georgia, I hope the day comes when this stereo­type will no longer res­onate with people.