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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.