An acceptance of darkness

“Art is the antidote that can call us back from the edge of numbness, restoring the ability to feel for another,” wrote Barbara Kingsolver in 1995 in her first collection of essays, High Tide in Tucson. She goes on to prove that it indeed does — restoring faith in the art (and power) of telling stories — by narrating to us the tale of Demon Copperhead.

Demon Copperhead who gets himself born — which is where all his troubles began — with his fate written for him. Born to a teenage addict for a mother and a dead man for a father. Born as Damon Fields, to be known as Demon Copperhead shortly after — courtesy, the shadow of his ‘Ghost Dad’. Born in a single-wide trailer for a home, ragged — inside and outside; in southwest Virginia of the 80s and 90s, in Lee County, the “world capital of the lose-lose situation”; where pain and trauma are the only family heirlooms. As anyone who is born with such trodden circumstances will tell you, it takes a lifetime to rewrite one’s fate. It is this falling, breaking, rebuilding and rewriting that Demon does growing up, that makes all the difference.

Author of 17 books and recipient of many awards and honours, Barbara Kingsolver writes her 10th novel, set in the Appalachian Mountains, which continues to create ripples even after eight months of its release in autumn last year. An Appalachian herself, she has found her way back to the farms and mountains of Virginia, in her life and her work.

Co-winner of this year’s Pulitzer Prize for fiction and of Women’s Prize for Fiction 2023 (which Kingsolver is the only writer to win for the second time), the book draws inspiration from David Copperfield — the 1850 coming-of-age novel by Charles Dickens — in structure and in spirit.

To write a parallel to Dickens is a brave thing to do and might, at first glance, open a space for comparison and conflict; but from an artist’s point of view, it is not only the highest form of flattery but also an attempt to resurrect old themes with new skin — issues that do not seem to go away, generation after generation.

While she adapts his characters and their personalities, readers will find that the modern twist and flavour in Kingsolver’s work brings more heartbreak than David Copperfield ever did, to the table. David’s was a story of struggle (of personal and social identity), whereas Demon’s is a straight tragedy, which he fights to turn around.

Hope and rescue

A Wednesday child, full of woe, as the rhyme goes, Demon’s is a story of a 10-year-old, lost and hoping to be found. Practically raised by the good-hearted, next-door Peggots and later passed around from one foster care to another, Demon lives a life of hunger, poverty, addiction, homelessness, and short-lived glories. What stands out is his astonishing profundity and wisdom in understanding the world and his acceptance of the darkness in his (unforgiving) life, which, on many occasions, is a thin line between giving up and fighting back — an age-old orphan habit. He dreams of the ocean and draws superheroes — stories of hope and rescue — unaware of his worth and potential. The themes of death, a lost sense of community and belongingness and ‘the lost life’ are at the heart of Demon Copperhead. Subtlety is central to the book. Kingsolver, it seems, is the master of subtle wit and humour as well as of exposing the flaws of the American economy and its health and education systems, all side effects of industrialisation and capitalism. She ignites the city versus country parlay across the book, taking a jab at the ‘rural stereotype’ — their disadvantages and its mockery. In making real the realities of many we are conveniently blind and deaf to, the novel achieves its highest victory: “A good story doesn’t just copy from life, it pushes back on it.” “The first to fall in any war are forgotten. No love gets lost over one person’s reckless mistake. Only after it’s a mountain of bodies bagged do we think to raise a flag and call the mistake by a different name,” writes Kingsolver and we learn that the true veracity of a tragedy, of any silent war, can be reckoned only when a child drowns in it; and even though drowning is one kind of death Demon is immune from, he does swim through the waste of his life and come out the other end, a resilient survivor.

All children are as breakable as much as they are mendable. Demon is both. Dickens would have certainly approved.