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Her depictions of the historical situation are less trustworthy, although she assures the reader that she asked many "experts" to comment on her manuscript, including convicted murderer Mumia Abu-Jamal, "who gave it a thumbs-up from his cell in the Pennsylvania state penitentiary." In describing, for example, the insurrection that ousted the Belgians and paved the way for the brief ascendency of the rebel leader Patrice Lumumba, she is long on the revolutionaries' heroics and short on the facts that they were as indiscriminate in their raping and pillaging as the corrupt ousted regime. (Missionary Helen Roseveare, who served in the Congo during the revolution, can attest to this.)
But Kingsolver's descriptions of life with the tribe are spellbinding. The section that describes the onslaught of the killer ants, consuming everything in their path as they make their way through the village—including humans who might fail to outrun them—will make you squirm. Later, when she depicts the desperately starving villagers attempting to capture game by burning a hill, the narration is so riveting that you may wonder if your eyebrows got singed in the reading.
And there are other signs that Kingsolver cares a great deal about accuracy. The book contains a bibliography at the end—not something one expects to find in a novel—listing 28 titles about Africa and the Congo. "Three cheers for the fiction writers who bother to get their facts straight," Kingsolver wrote in a review of Cathleen Schine's The Evolution of Jane (New York Times, October 11, 1998). In that review, Kingsolver laments the willingness of readers to overlook inaccuracy in factual details in the sciences—astronomy, botany, zoology, and the like. The result, she says, is "a blissfully ignorant exchange between author and consumer that dumbs us down."
But all this makes the novel's glaring lapses all the more conspicuous. When it comes to theology, missiology, and church history, Kingsolver abandons rigor, abandons her commitment to accuracy. We have been theologically dumbed down in this book. For all her zeal to reflect the African situation accurately, and for all the experts she consulted, evidently none were Southern Baptists.
I cannot imagine a Southern Baptist, living or dead, who would say, as Nathan Price does in a conversation with his daughter Leah: "God helps those who help themselves"—a line Jay Leno uses during his street surveys to measure the public's biblical illiteracy! Baptism, to Nathan Price (as recounted by one of his daughters), is a "contract" with Jesus Christ. After several children in the village die of an intestinal disorder, he says "If baptized, the children [who died] would be in heaven now." How could anyone even remotely familiar with the subject so misrepresent the Baptist understanding of the nature of baptism and the concept of the confession of faith and the age of accountability? (The only version of the Bible this Southern Baptist missionary uses, by the way, is the one that includes the Apocrypha—the Catholic Bible! Where are those New Yorker fact-checkers when you really need them?)
When I told my husband—a Baptist pastor—how Kingsolver presents Nathan Price through the narratives of the wife and daughters, my husband asked, "Does he get a chapter of his own?" No, he doesn't, and that betrays the weakness of the book on both fronts. His voice, when heard, is forced and implausible, his speech a jumbled parroting of the King James Version. The novel's only interpretation of his motives and theological impulses comes through the whimsical, sarcastic, sometimes sardonic reflections of his suffering daughters and miserable wife. By reducing Price to caricature, Kingsolver keeps him predictably detestable. The reader wants Nathan Price to die a slow, painful death—and sure enough, he does!
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