Barbara Kingsolver is one of my favourite novelists. An American writer with a scientific background, she writes with a deftness of touch and absorbing storylines about serious issues like the questionable impact of missionaries, the impact of climate change on the natural world, and the attraction people feel for strong leaders even if those leaders fail to deliver.
After Kingsolver’s excellent early novel, Pigs in Heaven (2003), I particularly relished her 1998 book about American missionaries in Africa, The Poisonwood Bible, and also Flight Behavior, her 2012 novel centred on the climate change induced disruption of butterfly migration.
Kingsolver’s most recent novel Unsheltered (2018) is excellent. It tells two linked stories. The first is set in contemporary America in the aftermath of the global financial crisis and during the rise in power of a Trump-like leader. The other story is based in the 19thcentury at a time when Charles Darwin’s ideas of evolution were strongly contested.
While the first tells of a struggling family with a range of problems familiar and intriguing to the contemporary reader, the second centres on two amateur scientists, Mary, a woman who collects and catalogues carnivorous plants and Thatcher, the married science teacher next door. The stories are linked through a common location, an old house in New Jersey where the modern-day grandmother Willa and the 19th century botanist Mary both lived.
As the chapters progress, the two stories alternate, building the momentum of each story and also providing a kind of echo to the other. Issues differ but there are many common themes. The link between the two stories is further underlined by chapters sharing a phrase; the last words of each chapter are used as the first words of the next. For example, one chapter ends with Willa receiving a text message from her daughter. The text ends: ‘Bad storm they’re saying. Shelter in place.’ The next chapter begins ‘Shelter in Place’ with its relevance to the story of Mary and Thatcher. It is as if Kingsolver wrote the novel this way, using the last part of each chapter as a prompt for the next.
Barbara Kingsolver captures the uncertainty of current times in which everything seems to be changing and old certainties no longer hold. Willa feels unsheltered psychologically and literally as her house disintegrates around her and , despite an academic salary, she doubts she can afford to stay.
The novel ends on a note of hope that while the next generation may live differently, they will find a way to cope in new circumstances. Unsheltered is a novel which entertains and provokes thought at the same time. If you are feeling uncertain, even unsheltered, in our current world, read this book and marvel at the clever way Barbara Kingsolver explores this feeling and suggests it is not unique to our generation.
Title: Unsheltered
Author: Barbara Kingsolver
Publisher: Faber and Faber
Date: 2018
ISBN: 9780571347018
Pages: 480