The Poisonwood Bible, the fourth and the most ambitious novel by Barbara Kingsolver, begins in 1959 and proceeds to cover three decades of the turbulent and tragic history of Zaire: before, during and after in-dependence. History, to many contemporary writers, has meant the nostalgic reworking of canonical texts; others, like Margaret Atwood and Timothy Mo, have renamed countries and personages in the Caribbean or in South-East Asia, claiming fictional licence to unveil true stories.

Kingsolver takes the risk of locating her book in the real terrain of documented events; she includes at its end an impressive bibliography.

Though the offstage rise and betrayal of Patrice Lumumba adds a crucial moral element to the construction of the novel, the author nevertheless succeeds in making the human dimension of her story its most compelling feature.

The wife and four daughters of Nathan Price take turns to narrate. Fired by missionary zeal, Price, an American Baptist, moves with his family to Kilanga in the Belgian Congo. He thinks the word of Christ will transcend all barriers of culture and race, while Oreanna, his wife, gets on with the job of living and feeding her offspring in a strange and often hostile land. Kingsolver draws on their beliefs to present contrasting visions: the intransigence of evangelical Christianity pitted against a gentler humanitarian faith that embraces difference. For each of the daughters - Rachel, the twins Leah and Adah, and the baby of the family Ruth May - the experience of Africa is far removed from the Christian duties they are exhorted to propagate. Ruth May is absorbed into Africa with a child's innocent fervour. For Rachel, terrified by the disasters around them, the Congo is hell on earth; she longs for the comforts of her lost American girlhood. Adah, handicapped at birth and locked in wilful silence, creates for herself a world of subversive palindromes.

Leah, driven, passionate, oddly influenced by her father's doctrinaire spirit which in her case translates into political commitment, is the novel's central presence. Her growing consciousness absorbs decades of African history. She also inherits the burden of American guilt which she feels her white skin proclaims. She delivers the novel's poignant and at times polemical critique of her country's neocolonialist interventions in the destinies of "backward" nations; she articulates Kingsolver's concern for ancient cultures threatened by capitalist trajectories and Western hegemonies. But Leah's is primarily a story of abiding love, and her idealism born of this love - for the revolutionary Anatole, for the continent she adopts as her own, and for her part-African children. Her righteous anger finally gives way to compassion; she learns that "time erases whiteness all together".

Kingsolver uses other perspectives as an ironical counterpoint to Leah's ideological passions. The framework of the family's life collapses when the country is decolonized; the structure of the novel, too, becomes fragmentary about halfway through, exchanging chronological sequence for an elliptical view of time and a frenzied interweaving of voices. Oreanna sounds a distant echo; yet it is she who succinctly chronicles America's hideous role in the defeat of Lumumba. Rachel, with her malapropisms and retrograde notions, represents prejudice and cliched Western fears of the Third World's oppressive poverty; but she, like Leah, stays on in Africa, exemplifying the eternal expatriate, exploitative and upwardly mobile, unable to identify but always fearful of return. Ruth May dies young.

Adah's eventual release from her mute and crippled state of being reveals, in retrospect, a tracery of symbolism - almost allegory - woven delicately into this naturalistic novel. The damaged twin finds a destiny of her own in America as a scientist, linking her life to Leah's and to Africa. "To live", she learns, "is to be marked. To live is to change, to die one hundred deaths."

Then, distanced by the third person but not peripheral, there are the men.

Nathan is, for all his flaws, an oddly heroic figure, whose foolhardy desire to divert the Congolese from their age-old beliefs by appropriating and misusing their language gives the novel its title. Anatole is the democratic conscience of post-colonial Africa; his constant conflicts with oppressive regimes force Leah into exile, but his love continues to give her a reason to live and believe.

Barbara Kingsolver's prose is both precise and lyrical, soaring at times like the sermons she parodies or inverts, at others immediate and sensuous - particularly in the descriptions of African village life. Her art is proof of the way today's fiction is traversing new boundaries in its ability to engage with conflicting realities. She can be didactic, and occasionally risks idealizing and mythologizing Africa's precolonial past (as she has done with Native American culture in Animal Dreams). But this is in keeping with the impassioned sensibilities of her protagonists. She finds in Africa an ultimate message of survival and reconciliation. For the Price women, the weight of memory, too, will in time become a gift: "You are afraid you might forget, but you never will. You will forgive and remember . . . . Move on. Walk forward into the light."

THE POISONWOOD BIBLE by Barbara Kingsolver

546pp Faber £10.99

571 19763 9

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