It can be a perilous thing for a fiction writer to
have a strong social message as it risks a story that is heavy-handed and
preachy. But for the first two thirds of US author Barbara Kingsolver’s latest
novel Flight Behaviour (Faber,
$39.99) it seems as if she has pulled it off, delivering her sermon on climate
change within the framework of an absorbing narrative with a convincing lead
character whose life she immerses the reader in completely.
Dellarobia Turnbow is a dirt poor and dissatisfied
young mother in rural Tennessee. We meet her at the point when she’s about to
risk what little she has by cheating on her wholesome but dull husband Cub. On
her way to a love tryst, hiking up the mountain on the Turnbow family farm, a curious,
almost biblical sight stops her in her tracks. A forest of fir trees is blazing
and sparking with orange. At first Dellarobia fears fire but, with no smoke or
smell of burning, she begins to believe this unearthly beauty – which she
describes as looking like “the inside of joy, if a person could see that” - is
a vision sent to save her from wrecking her life for a man she barely knows.
What Dellarobia is actually looking at is huge
clusters of Monarch butterflies overwintering in trees that provide them with
shelter and warmth. And while this is a beautiful sight, it is also a terrible
one – for the Monarchs are meant to be in Mexico rather than the Appalachian
mountains and their presence is a signal that something has gone wrong with the
environment.
The arrival of the butterflies changes everything.
Dellarobia becomes a minor celebrity in her depressed bible belt town, family
loyalties shift, plans to log the forest on the Turnbow mountain are threatened
and new people appear in her hitherto small, stifling life. Scientist Ovid
Byron and his team of researchers set up camp in her barn while they study the
butterfly phenomenon. And beautiful, clever Dellarobia finds herself
increasingly attracted to both him and his work.
It's Dellarobia and Ovid’s longer conversations
that are the weak points of this book, the places where the science overwhelms
the story and Kingsolver begins to bang her climate change drum just that
little too hard. This is a matter of only a few pages but it's clunky and lets
down what is otherwise a carefully-crafted, thoughtful story.
A trained scientist, Kingsolver lives in southern
Appalachia and has drawn on these parts of her background profoundly for this
novel. It is clear she knows all her characters inside out, from the hardscrabble
farmers to the passionate entomologist. The sheer drudgery of Dellarobia’s
existance, her relationship with her tricky mother-in-law, her love for her
children, her yearning for something different and the reasons she’s taken the
wrong path in life in the first place, all are authentic.
There is a strain of ironic humour running through
the novel too, in particular a great scene where Dellarobia meets an eco
do-gooder and discovers her poverty makes her far greener than he could ever
imagine being.
Kingsolver writes enviably brilliant, beautiful
prose that is both accessible and finely-tuned. As a result Flight Behaviour is a damn good read.
And while it may fall marginally short of perfection, its powerful images and
central message have stayed with me. A moving, involving, immensely readable
book – if its not on your summer holiday reading list then it should be!
Footnote:
Footnote:
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