The Political Is Personal -- Barbara Kingsolver's Novel Measures Tragedy In The Congo In Terms Of Intimate, Individual Costs

------------------------------- BOOK REPORT

Barbara Kingsolver reads from her new novel, "The Poisonwood Bible," at 7:30 p.m. tomorrow at First United Methodist Church, 811 Fifth Ave., Seattle. Tickets are $5 - presented by Elliott Bay Book Co. (206-624-6600). -------------------------------

"We've all ended up giving up body and soul to Africa," says Leah Price late in "The Poisonwood Bible" (HarperFlamingo, $26), Barbara Kingsolver's ambitious and accomplished new novel.

Leah is one of the five female members of Georgia preacher Nathan Price's family who are forever changed by his missionary work in the Congo in 1959.

The Congo? Barbara Kingsolver? The legions of fans that have sent "The Bean Trees" and "Pigs in Heaven" to the best-seller list may wonder why their author has left the American Southwest for Africa. But Kingsolver brings to "The Poisonwood Bible" the same devotion to character and the same political passion that informed her previous novels.

The Congo entered Kingsolver's consciousness far back in 1963, when Kingsolver was just 7 and she and her family spent a year in Africa while her parents did public-health work. Though Kingsolver was too young to understand the political realities of the Congo, she did say in a recent interview, "Living there taught me to pay attention . . . (and) introduced me to the notion that everything I ever believed was right could be absolutely wrong in another place. That's what I write about again and again."

Kingsolver's realization, combined with her 10 years of research for "The Poisonwood Bible," make the book her richest work so far. Set against the turbulent history of the Congo from 1959 to the early 1990s, and narrated in alternate chapters by Nathan Price's wife, Orleanna, teenage daughters Leah, Adah and Rachel, and 5-year-old Ruth May, the novel chronicles in part the inevitable failure of Nathan's evangelical mission in the tiny Congo village of Kilanga.

But the book's dominant narrative concerns growing connections between the female Prices and the political fate of the Congo. Only Nathan Price, whom we wisely see only through the eyes of his daughters and wife, refuses to be moved by either the country's suffering at the hands of colonialist Belgium or the promise of its nascent independence movement.

"This is a political allegory," Kingsolver says of "The Poisonwood Bible," in which "Nathan stands for the conqueror and for the hyperbole of our cultural arrogance. Our process as readers is to examine him and take our positions."

These positions are clearly marked by the quintet of narrators. However, Kingsolver's sincere affection for the Price females and her artful distinctions among the novel's five voices defuse any notion that she has written a polemic, a charge made against her work in the past which she strenuously rejects: "People think art can only be political if it bludgeons you," Kingsolver says.

The intimate, idiosyncratic voices in "The Poisonwood Bible" belong to five people struggling to come to terms with the harshness of Nathn Price's God and the unquestioning generosity of the "heathen" Congolese. Most importantly, they are American voices forever altered by their exposure to a country for which they feel a lasting obligation.

By the end of the novel, Orleanna is forced to give up her political and religious naivete; Rachel, self-absorbed and willfully ignorant (and humorous: "The way I see Africa, you don't have to like it but you sure have to admit it's out there"), transforms herself into a new kind of African colonizer; and little Ruth May becomes African through a dramatic and eerie evolution.

But twin daughters Leah and Adah Price remain most memorable voices of "The Poisonwood Bible."

Leah is her father's loyal acolyte at the beginning of the novel until she finally sees the cruelty of his brand of Christianity. As the story progresses and the Congo's independence is shattered by the CIA-directed assassination of Patrice Lumumba, the Congo's first president, Leah gives herself over to the country in a very personal way, becoming involved in the opposition to the dictator Mobutu.

Adah, Leah's twin, is Kingsolver's most curious character. Partly paralyzed, mute, crippled, yet capable of unique brilliance, Adah is the only one able to see through her father's folly right from the start: "Africa has slipped the floor out from under my righteous house," she says. In adulthood, she puts her skewed intellect to work during the murderous reign of Mobutu.

"As a U.S. citizen," Kingsolver says, "I'm interested in what my country has done to others." As a novelist, Kingsolver has written a powerful and urgent story of an American family and its ties to what Kingsolver calls "one of the most dramatic and devastating political parables of the century."

Through its sharply differentiated characters, its wealth of details on the environment, language and customs of the Congo, and its clear delineation of American responsibility for the tragedy that the Congo still is today, "The Poisonwood Bible" is a triumph of both the personal and the political. And like Barbara Kingsolver's other work, it entertains while it calls each reader's conscience to attention.