Flight Behaviour

By Barbara Kingsolver, Faber and Faber, 440pp. £18.99

FICTION:SHE WRITES BIG BOOKS about big subjects. The Poisonwood Bible, perhaps her best-known novel, was an exposé of the hubris and stupidity of American imperialism in Africa. Her last, The Lacuna, which won the Orange Prize for Fiction in 2010, was an impressively laconic but moving evisceration of American anti-communist witch-hunting. Her new novel, Flight Behaviour, is an impassioned story about climate change. On the important social and political questions of our time Barbara Kingsolver is clearly right-on, which is a way of saying that, humanly speaking, her heart is in the right place. And she can write superbly.

So what’s not to like? Perhaps the awkward fact that novels and noble convictions aren’t necessarily the best of partners. And in Flight Behaviour Kingsolver does indulge her preacher side.

On a bleak mountain in Appalachia something marvellous is happening. It’s seen first, in the manner of an apparition, by Dellarobia, on her way to a furtive assignation with the local “telephone man”. Dellarobia is fed up with her life. With her nice but slow-witted husband, Cub; her humdrum days on the farm as mother to two children; her hostile mother-in-law, Hester; and never having enough money. The sexy telephone man is a diversion from all this, disguised as love, hopefully.

It’s winter, a grey and oddly tepid and sodden winter in Appalachia. But the mountain is aglow, lit with golden light. The light is coming from the orange markings of millions of butterflies, flitting among the trees where no butterflies have been seen before. The wondrous scene grants Dellarobia a change of heart. She abandons ideas of the telephone man and goes back home to try to make the best of things.

Gradually the presence of the butterflies brings about a general change.

Sightseers tramp up the mountain, TV news teams descend, New Age pilgrims camp out. And an environmentalist, Dr Ovid Byron, arrives with a bunch of students to study the phenomenon. But it’s in Dellarobia that the biggest changes occur. Uneducated but smart, she was knocked off course in high school by early pregnancy and the obligatory marriage to Cub. She’s a frustrated intellectual, an academic waiting to happen. Ovid, the scientist, acknowledges Dellarobia’s potential where others, like Hester, have resented it, or, like Cub, feared it. He sets up his trailer lab in the farmyard, and within a few weeks Dellarobia is observing in the field, peering into microscopes and compiling rather complex butterfly data. She’s even briefly a TV icon of butterfly bliss, which is how the public wants to see the golden hordes.

Kingsolver tries very painstakingly to make Dellarobia a rounded character.

She has a high-school buddy called Dovey, and the two of them goof around, in time-honoured buddy fashion, with smartphones and hair straighteners. She has her weaknesses: a propensity to fall for the well-turned muscles of any passing man and the smoking of cigarettes. She has low self-esteem and sees herself as having thrown in her lot with her hillbilly in-laws. She can be mean to Hester. We’re meant to admire Dellarobia, though, struggling against the odds. She’s an excellent mother, never forgetting to check on the kids, Preston and Cordelia, not smoking in front of them, and nurturing Preston’s sweetly old-fashioned interest in nature and books.

Essentially, however, Dellarobia is not so much a character as an instrument the author has constructed to convey her attitudes and opinions. She plays an earnest interlocutor for Ovid as he explains the biology and life cycle of the monarch butterfly. And, exhaustively, the dire meaning of the butterflies’ arrival on the mountain. Climate warming has banished them from their age-old breeding ground in Mexico, and they must wander the earth looking for a new habitat. Like Dellarobia they have been knocked off course. The implication is, of course, that so too has the planet. The reader has no choice but to join Dellarobia in her relentless learning curve.

The author has opinions about all manner of things. The good teaching practices in Preston’s kindergarten are contrasted with the bad practices in Dellarobia’s high school. Dellarobia goes shopping – a lot – in the used-goods stores, and we are lectured on the virtues of recycling. And about the lamentable ways in which the US, apart from a few enlightened souls, lives now. Too much of Flight Behaviour reads like a tract for right living. Not that one doesn’t agree with these opinions, but they can’t be said to be original. And it does set up an instinctive resistance when you’re nudged and chivvied into them by a didactic author. You can feel you’re being hectored. The book can seem like one of those tracts for children in which the rules for good behaviour used to poke out of the stories like stepping stones in ponds.

The plight of the butterflies turns out to be a positive for Dellarobia. Ovid pays her good money. She quits smoking, and the way is cleared for her to go to college and make a new start. She will obey the most fundamental of American imperatives and “get ahead” in life. Another writer might note the irony in this, but Kingsolver doesn’t.

In The Lacuna there was artistry and control. Flight Behaviour is a well-intentioned outpouring. There are some beautifully written set pieces, however. The last section has an almost epic quality as Dellarobia, once again alone on the mountain, moves outside herself and watches in a state of mind akin to ecstasy the apocalyptic fate of the family farm below. It reminds us that humanity seeks destruction as much as we seek stability and happiness. But can this unexpected and disturbing truth be what Kingsolver really wants to tell us?

Anne Haverty’s most recent novel is The Free and Easy