There is no trick to bringing together, in the same novel, an apocalyptic epic of climate change and the tale of a young woman’s liberation into a fuller life. There is no trick. There is a gift and that gift belongs to Barbara Kingsolver and she grants it to us in her novel Flight Behaviour.
Good novels immerse readers in worlds. In the case of Flight Behaviour, terrifying truths and existential fears are presented in an engaging manner. Flight Behaviour is a fictional work set in rural Tennessee, written by one of a small number of novelists with a science background. Kingsolver has academic degrees. She is also an artist, who knows that novels are about people, their truths and their fears.
A young woman, Dellarobia (terrific name!), who works on a farm rearing sheep with her husband and his family, experiences a moment of near-Biblical revelation when she discovers the hill above her home carpeted with gloriously coloured Monarch butterflies. She is there alone, but expecting a lover. An aura of transgression surrounds her, as she is overwhelmed by the beauty she encounters.
Even if the reader has never been to rural Tennessee, s/he will feel she knows this woman, her family and her neighbours. They are denizens of Trump Land, living through Trump Times, denying climate change. They are righteously suspicious of urbanites and experts, used to being patronised for their poverty and lack of education. It is a strange contradiction that the people who are first to feel the harm of a changing climate are the last to be able to talk about it.
Dellarobia is well aware of the difference in social class between her family and the graduate students who come to study the butterflies. The novel favours personal engagement over navel-gazing. It doesn’t shy away from the economics of Dellarobia’s world and the striking class divisions and social dissonance she and her family lives with. The students wear shoes that cost more than her husband earns driving a gravel truck. They have traveled far from home to study the butterflies. Does she sense an irony in the fact that the students study aristocrats, albeit insects, and not paupers like her? They know more and they have more, though they appear poor. A scene in a ‘new to you’ shop trying to buy Christmas presents on a tight budget is funny and heart-wrenching. Kingsolver offers education as the route out of her situation. It is no surprise, but a mild disappointment, that Dellarobia takes that route in the classic liberal antidote to deprivation.
We need to understand a certain amount of science in order to make decent policy about the world we live in. Translating scientific ideas into vernacular English is challenging. Kingsolver succeeds in presenting it in an engaging and entertaining manner by asking herself the fundamental question in imaginative work: what if?
She avoids being corralled into the science fiction genre. She creates good fiction, grounded in real science. Her work is literature. It is symbolic. It shows the story. It does not simply tell it.
Might fiction help us to talk about climate change? Would this make Kingsolver’s literary work simply instrumental? There is a successfully old-fashioned appeal to the novel, as if Victor Hugo wrote it for the American rather than the French republic. The characters are self-absorbed, but rather than navel-gazing they reflect on life in the context of the social and the natural world they inhabit. Just like other species. Why should our species be an exception?
The locals consider the unfolding of a shocking and disastrous biological event as a miracle from the Lord. Scientists arrive. They declare it an awful example of the effects of climate change. Many species of migrating insects, birds and other animals are shifting their seasonal patterns, monarch butterflies are among them.
Kingsolver conceives a fiction to talk about climate change and about the methods of science using these shifting migration patterns. She reveals Dellaraobia’s understanding of the world and her place in it, as she becomes immersed in wonder. The reader joins her as she asks why she believes what she believes, when Dellarobia is assailed by beauty. Kingsolver’s descriptions are well up to the language task of expressing how amazing the world actually is.
Does the writing become didactic/pedantic at times? Yes, especially when information passes from the professor to the farm worker. Or when Dellarobia answers questions for her inquisitive young son, Preston. Such scenes echo Shaw’s My Fair Lady/Pygmalion.
Why don't we see what's right in front of us? Why do we believe or disbelieve the evidence we see for climate change? Science is about what is, not about what should be.
Novels present information in a different way from journalism or lectures. They take the reader inside the minds of other people, creating empathy for the theoretical stranger. It's a fresh avenue to get to the head via the heart.
A novel can't explain how to fix everything. It asks questions that humans ask in the laboratory of experence. Questions worthy of the attention of the most powerful faculty we possess: our imagination.
Flight Behaviour has all the elements necessary for a novel: plot; characters; extraordinary events; conflict; style and symbolism and enters the story by showing, not telling. Flight Behaviour by Barbara Kingsolver is splendid and a great read.
Recommended.
Flight Behaviour, novel, Barbara Kingsolver, Faber and Faber, London, 2013
Swarming Monarch butterflies
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lWOySU_hAz0&t=158s
Interviews with and reviews of the work of Barbara Kingsolver
npr.org
Aside: NPR TINY DESK has a unique range of concerts to suit many tastes.
Here are two examples.
Funk with Charlie Wilson
https://www.npr.org/2023/06/05/1179416602/charlie-wilson-tiny-desk-concert
Songs with Bono and The Edge, and a choir from Duke Ellington School of the Arts
https://www.npr.org/2023/03/17/1163072864/bono-and-the-edge-tiny-desk-concert
No comments:
Post a Comment