As I embark upon this whole new journey of ‘Blogging’, I hope my readers will understand that I do not claim to be an expert in the material I am addressing, just an interested reader and observer.
I first came across Barbara Kingslover when my university book club had us read The Poisonwood Bible and I presented a paper on it. I enjoyed her style of writing and when Flight Behaviour came along, I suggested it to my book club and did a paper on it as well. I was also intrigued by the fact that the novel deals with the migration patterns of the monarch butterfly, something that had been first discovered by a Canadian researcher, Fred Urquhart.
The following paper contains the information I have gleaned about Barbara and my take on the story she has written.
“Spoiler Alert”- my comments below are intended for people who have already read the book.
FLIGHT BEHAVIOUR
By Barbara Kingslover
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Barbara Kingslover was born in 1955 and raised in rural Kentucky. Her father was a physician and when Barbara was seven years old, he took the whole family to the Congo for a short time where they lived without electricity or running water. Later in life, after becoming an established writer, Barbara was to use many of those experiences in her widely acclaimed novel, The Poisonwood Bible, which tells the story of a missionary family living in the Congo.
After graduating from high school, Kingslover attended DePauw University in Indiana on a music scholarship studying classical piano. She eventually changed her major to biology when she realized that “classical pianists compete for six job openings a year, and the rest get to play BLUE MOON in some hotel lobby.”
In 1977 Barbara graduated Phi Beta Kappa with a Bachelor of Science degree and moved to France for a year before settling down in Tucson, Arizona. In the early 1980’s she earned a master’s degree in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology from the University of Arizona. Here she also began her full-time writing career as a science writer for the university which led to some freelance feature writing for the Tucson Weekly. She began her career in fiction writing after winning a short story contest in a local Phoenix newspaper.
In 1985 Barbara married Joseph Hoffmann and in 1987 her daughter, Camille, was born. During the first Gulf War, she moved with her daughter to Tenerife in the Canary Islands because of her frustration with America’s military involvement in the war. After returning to the US she separated from her husband in 1992 and in 1994 was awarded an Honorary Doctorate of Letters from her alma mater, DePauw University. Shortly afterwards she married Stephen Hopp, an Ornithologist, and their daughter, Lily was born in 1996.
Kingslover has always been a bit of a trailblazer and in the late 1990’s she became a founding member of a Rock & Roll band called the Rock Bottom Remainders. The band only plays once a year and is made up of published writers which include Amy Tan and Stephen King. Kingslover played the keyboard but she is no longer an active member of the band.
Barbara Kingslover has also had a life-long commitment to social issues and in 2000 she received the National Humanities Medal which is America’s highest honour for service through the arts. Starting in April 2005, she and her family spent a full year making every effort to eat food produced as locally as possible. Living on their farm in rural Virginia, they grew much of their own food and obtained most of the rest from their neighbors and other local farmers. She then chronicled the family’s experiences in another widely acclaimed book called Animal, Vegetable, Miracle.
Barbara Kingslover believes that her best work is accomplished through writing and being an active citizen of her own community. In keeping with this philosophy, her most recent award-winning book, Flight Behaviour, deals with some of the most devastating effects of climate change and the catastrophic environmental implications it suggests.
ABOUT THE BOOK
Kingslover sets her novel, Flight Behaviour, on a sheep farm in the depressed Bible Belt of Appalachia. Here she recruits traditional images of Heaven, Hell and sacrificial lambs to convey the impact of climate change on a community, an ecosystem and a species. This setting also enables her to place the repercussions of this man-made disaster in the moral territory where it belongs. As Ovid Byron, an entomologist studying this disaster, screams at a TV climate change denier, “What you are doing is unconscionable. You are allowing the public to be duped by a bunch of liars.” This supports Robin McKie’s observation in his review of the book, “Kingslover makes her message clear. If only a few more scientists started screaming on TV and radio, then we might have a chance to avoid the worst of the calamities that lie ahead.”
The story begins when Dellarobia Turnbow, a mother of two young children who is trapped in a loveless shotgun marriage, stumbles upon a lake of orange fire while climbing up the mountainside to meet a secret lover. As she described it, “The flames now appeared to lift from individual treetops in showers of orange sparks, exploding the way a pine log does in a campfire when it is poked. The sparks spiralled upwards in swirls like funnel clouds. Twisters of brightness against grey sky.” This miracle of “unearthly beauty” first makes Dellarobia feel it must be some sort of divine intervention compelling her to abandon her lover and return to her family.
The phenomenon turns out to be a vast flock of monarch butterflies, whose disrupted migration pattern has catapulted them wildly off course. While the local people are convinced that the arrival of those butterflies is a message from God, the researchers who come to investigate, led by the gifted African-American entomologist, Ovid Byron, put the blame on a very different agent – climate change.
During the course of the novel, Dellarobia herself makes a journey from caterpillar to butterfly. The journey begins when Ovid Byron hires her to help him make some sense of the strange apparition on her land. In the process of learning how to help him, Dellarobia acquires a self-confidence she had been denied by her lack of education and her poverty. As her personal development intensifies, she is finally able to plan a future for herself that will allow her to leave her marriage and begin working on the college education she has always desired.
In the meantime, working alongside Ovid’s team of entomologists, Dellarobia is exposed to a parallel universe of education and plenty. For example, one of the most touching scenes in the novel involves the contrasting cost of things in those two worlds. On a Christmas shopping trip to buy presents for her children at the local dollar store, most of what Dellarobia finds is too expensive. However, when she helps the scientists unpack crates of finely calibrated equipment to construct a field laboratory, they casually toss out price estimates such as “maybe a few thousand dollars” or “in the neighborhood of two grand”.
As Dellarobia learns to identify and assess butterfly behaviour, she becomes humiliatingly aware of the limited scope of the only world she has known. It is this growing awareness that prompts her to make the life change she has craved. As Ovid and his team enlarge her world, she gives up smoking and works very diligently to accomplish what is expected of her. As Kingslover so poetically puts it, “Every day she rose and rose to the occasion of this man.”
Slowly, alongside her serious five-year-old son, Preston, Dellarobia learns that the unexpected and aberrant arrival of the butterflies is a signpost on the road to environmental hell. They are another example, along with the floods of Biblical proportions that have just descended upon the area, of the paradigm shift being brought about by climate change. Moreover, Kingslover seems to be telling us that the forces set loose in this way will be nothing to those that will be sweeping the world as it gets warmer and warmer.
But how to cope with it? What solutions can be offered to combat those devastating developments? Although Dellarobia realizes the precarious paradise of the mountainside may be lost to her son and her daughter, she bristles at the unwitting condescension of the eco-campaigners who come to set up a camp nearby. When she is asked to sign an energy-saving pledge, she is baffled by its demands. Like anyone else hanging on by a thread, she has no need for advice about not leaving her computer on standby, cutting down on red meat, rationing her fuel use, saving electricity, buying recycled clothes and “flying less”. She has never owned a computer or boarded a plane. In fact, nothing on the list applies to her because her poverty makes her just about the lowest possible emitter of carbon in the United States.
Towards the close of the novel, Dellarobia finds a lamb in the snow that had been born unseasonably early. The only way to revive it is to swing it around by the hind legs to kickstart the lungs and decongest the airways. With her husband’s help, she saves its life, but the manoeuvre is traumatic for both of them. The novel seems to be saying that just as only a shocking, harrowing solution could offer any future to the newborn lamb, it will also take a seismic shift of radical proportions to offer any hope for this fragile planet of ours. It is a harsh but vital message and one that Kingslover feels has to be heard to save us from stumbling willfully blind towards the abyss, not just for the endangered monarch butterfly, but for the stubbornly flawed species that has unwittingly aided this mass extinction.
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Now that you have read my paper, I would be interested in knowing your views on the material I have presented. This is by no means a formal review of the book, merely an addressing of the aspects that spoke to me, and I do hope you found it worthwhile reading.
Yours Truly,
Esther Carter Earle
www.esthercarterearle.com