Customer Reviews

Flight Behaviour

Barbara Kingsolver writes beautiful measured novels and Flight Behaviour is no exception.  Though slow out of the blocks, Kingsolver gradually binds its threads  together to form an utterly compelling whole.  

Dellarobia Turnbow steps out from her back door intent on wrecking her marriage. For ten years she has lived a humdrum existence on her husband's family farm.  She is heading for a secret tryst with a young telephone engineer, but in small town Tennessee can anything be kept secret?  On her way she is stopped in her tracks by a natural wonder, a valley of fire.  She returns to her home, glad of the wake up call, and her narrow escape from infidelity. 

The Turnbow farm is struggling to survive.  The recession has hit hard, wiping out the farm's meager profits.  When her father-in-law decides he is going to allow a logging company to decimate his land's trees Dellarobia feels obliged to speak out.  She exhorts her husband, Cub, to take look over the land.  When he does he discovers the same unnatural wonder as his wife.  Convinced that Dellarobia has had a vision, Cub blurts out in church what they have seen.  A wondrous sight on private land suddenly becomes public property.

Flight Behaviour is about so many things it's hard to know where to start.  At its heart is the interaction between three distinct groups of people.  The media, who want to present the phenomenon in a way that will generate as many ratings as possible, the scientists, who want to present only the facts, and the farmers, who must do what's needed to preserve their livelihoods.   Dellarobia sits in two camps.  She is a farmer's wife, reliant on the farm turning a profit, but she yearns for more.  Can she use her brush with science to kick-start a life arrested by an unwanted teenage pregnancy? 

The book is filled with fabulous beauty.  The wilderness and Dellarobia's discovery are described in rich detail.  Counterpoint to the beauty is the heartache and harsh reality of lives spent hovering around the breadline.  The World's media is often disparaging of Bible Belt Republicans, but Kingsolver's depiction of them is compassionate and heartfelt.

As a father who, fortunately, has never had to worry about where my family's next meal is coming from, I found Dellarobia's struggle to feed her children particularly affecting.  There is one section where she and Cub are trying to find Christmas presents, that left me emotionally wrung out.  It encapsulates the plight of countless families in the world's richest economy.  

Ultimately, this novel is about the fragility of existence. Whether it be a farm, a marriage or an entire ecosystem, continued survival is a fine balance of uncountable variables.  Even the most innocuous changes could mean extinction.  Flight Behaviour is an understated novel, rich in language and themes.  It's by no means a page turner but it is a powerful meditation on twenty-first century morals and the difficulties of balancing what is best for the planet against what is best for humanity.  Flight Behaviour sees Kingsolver at the height of her powers and once again she has delivered an authentic meaningful and compelling read.   

In the interests of reviewer clarity, I feel obliged to point out that my copy of this book was a review copy provided by the publisher.

Flight Behaviour is the 5th stand-alone novel by Barbara Kingsolver. In the Appalachian Mountains above her home, eastern Tennessee farm wife and mother of two, Dellarobia Turnbow is about to take a step that will change her unsatisfactory life forever when she is arrested by a vision of something she has never before encountered. What seems like a miracle is, however, threatened by her father-in-law's decision to allow the mountain to be clear-felled by a logging company. Those who start reading and think this is the formulaic righteous woman plus scientist battling against hick farmers and loggers to save endangered species will need to think again! Of all the things I predicted about this novel at the beginning, the only one I got right was that it is very, very good. I was assured of that in just the first few pages by prose like "How they admired their own steadfast lives. Right up to the day when hope in all its versions went out of stock, including the crummy discount brands, and the heart had just one instruction left: run." and "Whoever was in charge of the weather had put a recall on blue and nailed up this mess of dirty-white sky like a lousy sheet-rock job." I also loved "His moustache made two curved lines around the sides of his mouth like parentheses, as if everything he might say would be very quiet, and incidental." This novel has a plot that didn't go where I expected; the characters, too, surprised me when I thought I had their measure. Kingsolver skilfully conveys the desperation of poverty in everyday life and its effect on education, life choices and what people come to believe. She also highlights the importance of the manner in which scientists convey their message to the general public. This novel had me laughing out loud (especially at Dovey's church marquee sayings), choking up, giving a cheer (for Facebook of all things!), moved to caring about the fate of certain insects and thinking about many things: climate change, poverty, the decline of craftsmanship in the face of mass production, the cost of research, the disposable society and the increasing waste of goods. Kingsolver manages to make a huge amount of information about lepidoptery, sheep farming and lambing, global warming and the environment, easy to assimilate by incorporating it into this wonderfully uplifting tale. Her passion for the environment and our role in climate change is apparent in every paragraph. A brilliant, thought-provoking read, probably her best yet!

"Flight behaviour" is wordplay to cover both the orange monarch butterflies deflected from their usual migration patterns by the effects of climate change, and a Tennessee farmer's wife, symbolically also flame-haired, seeking to escape from the trap of her marriage to a kind but dull husband still ruled by his domineering parents.

Although her small daughter Cordelia has been nicknamed "Cordie", Dellarobia does not shorten her own distinctive name. An ill-judged attempt at adultery is averted when she is amazed by the sight of a lake of fire which proves to be great clusters of butterflies clinging to tree trunks on the wooded slopes above her home. My interest was hooked when I realised that the incredible details of these insects and their life cycles are based on fact, the author being a trained biologist with a mission to inform us through fiction.

The arc of the overall story is strong, and Barbara Kingsolver explores some interesting themes, such as the varying attitudes to the butterflies when a team of scientists come to study them. The locals, for instance, tend to reject climate change because the popular media play it down, but the strongly religious community feels that the butterflies may have some special significance, even to the extent of questioning the right of Dellarobia's father-in-law's to earn much-needed cash from felling the trees in which the butterflies have chosen to winter.

"The Poisonwood Bible" is a hard act for the author to follow, but I found "Flight Behaviour" hard-going, partly because it often gets bogged down in detail and long-windedness, crying out for a good edit. Although she is capable of sharp, funny dialogue and powerful descriptions, too often the prose grated on me - clunky and folksy in a way I had not expected, although I wondered whether it was intentional to convey a sense of a traditional "hillbilly" community, resistant to change. So, my four stars are for an original and thought-provoking storyline rather than the quality of the writing which often disappointed me.

I have read every novel and all the anthologies of shorter work by Barbara Kingsolver but I couldn't get into this one.
There are the usual patches of vivid description and good insight into character and motivation. There are long extended metaphors of natural processes and evolutionary forces with their unforeseen consequences that are apt and well chosen; but all these don't add up to a great book.
The tale digressed and the structure became slack, making me reluctant to return to the tale. I could understand most of the folksy American vernacular but the mangled slangy speech and overuse of abbreviations like PBJ ( presumably peanut butter jelly) was tedious. The author has tried with her usual generous spirit to render the lives of disadvantaged people sympathetically. There is a palpable sense of her desperation in the face of an ignorant society slowly sawing itself off from its life support systems. She makes strong points concerning the dumbing down of the media and its misrepresentation of science. Interestingly, she is quite generous to the church,recognising its place as a bastion of a rural community without adequate social services.
She is amusing about the fatuous belief systems of the religious community while respecting the kindness and altruism of the pastor.
I'm sorry that the register of much of the language grated on my ear . Banal lives accurately rendered are banal.
I was pleased to finish this book. I persevered because I respect the author. I can't fully define why I wasn't more engaged. Perhaps it is because the author has an agenda that her characters must serve and it impairs their autonomy.

I used to really rate Barbara Kingsolver highly. I read all of her books and at one stage she was my favourite author. But she seems to have changed tack since The Poisonwood Bible and I do not like the more recent books at all. I gave up on The Lacuna, and simlarly gave up on Flight Behaviour. I think it is to do with the characters not seeming real and the long pages of descritive text just simply leave me cold, they just go on and on without adding to the substance. Maybe it's just me ....... as I see that Flight Behaviour has sold v well indeed.

Barbara Kingsolver, Pulitzer Prize finalist and winner of the Orange Prize for Fiction, has written a powerful message about the consequences of climate change with her latest novel 'Flight Behaviour'. Set in present day rural Appalachia, the novel's main protagonist is Dellarobia Turnbow, a young, bright and attractive mother of two small children who married when she fell pregnant at seventeen. Dellarobia feels stifled in her marriage to her husband, Cub, an unadventurous young man who works resignedly on his family's failing farm. Although Dellarobia loves her children, she considers being a stay-at-home mum the "loneliest kind of lonely, in which she was always and never by herself."

One autumn day, after a summer of heavy rains, Dellarobia throws caution to the wind and struggles up a slippery mountain track to secretly meet up in the woods with a young man she has developed an obsession for. But the meeting never takes place because before Dellarobia arrives at her destination, she sees what she initially believes to be a lake of fire with every tree blazing - but when there is no heat, she decides the bright orange glow must be some sort of vision or warning. Described by her mother-in-law as: "a 911 Christian; in the event of an emergency, call the Lord" Dellarobia is initially reluctant to share her vision, but when she discovers that her husband's family are selling the land to loggers to help keep the farm afloat, she encourages them to go up to the woods so they can see for themselves that something unusual is happening. Well, there is something very unusual happening, for fluttering amongst the trees are millions of orange Monarch butterflies which, we later learn, have been diverted from their usual destination of Mexico by the effects of pollution and climate change. (No spoilers here - we learn this early on in the novel).

At first the 'Bible-belt' Turnbows and their neighbours, encouraged by the town's pastor, see this as a miracle of sorts, some even viewing it as a lucrative tourist attraction; but when a research team arrives headed up by the attractive Ovid Byron, the dangers of climate change are really brought home - if not to all of the characters in the story, then certainly to the reader. When Byron notices Dellarobia and her natural intelligence and curiosity, she is hired to help with the project, throwing her into a confrontation with her family, her town, her church and, ultimately, the wider world.

Although I did not initially find Dellarobia an entirely appealing heroine, I did find her an interesting character: spirited, self-deprecating, with some cynical and amusing views on her husband's family and their neighbours and I felt her appeal grew as I watched her undergo a metamorphosis and a late coming of age during the course of the story. Barbara Kingsolver, a scientist before she was an author, writes convincingly and lucidly about the dangers of pollution and climate change, enabling the reader to easily absorb the worrying and frightening possibility of the collapse of the world's eco-system. I recently read an interview with the author where she stated that she didn't want to write a trivial novel, she doesn't tackle easy subjects, and she didn't want to waste the reader's time; well Barbara Kingsolver definitely hasn't tackled an easy subject here; it's not trivial, and she certainly hasn't wasted my time.

4 Stars.

I've read & LOVED other novels by Kingsolver - notably The Lacuna & The Poisonwood Bible. Also currently reading Homeland - a collection of short stories I can highly recommend. Flight Behaviour felt to me like it was written by someone else. The texture of the prose felt different, the characters less interesting, less complex, less must-read. In many ways this novel is set on more recognisable turf than the others I've read - perhaps this was the problem for me, I don't know, but unfortunately I was unable to finish it. It just didin't hold my attention. I didn't care enough about any of the characters. I was fully prepared to love this novel as much as its much-admired predecessors, but half-way through decided it wasn't for me. The official reviews are uniformly positive so I'm fully prepared to admit that perhaps it's me that's the problem. Or perhaps it's a case of the Emperor's New Clothes. But it definely felt like the work of a different, less experienced writer.

Whatever happened to Barbara Kingsolver? She is one of my all-time favourite authors - the Poisonwood Bible one of my all-time favourite books. I read her last novel, The Lacuna, when it came out and was a little disappointed - though it still had some of the old magic on the page. There were still beautiful passages to admire.

Flight Behaviour promised a return to form - an eco-novel with environmental issues integral to the plot. But, oh dear, not very far into the novel, I became bored - really bored - and found it difficult to turn the pages. Eventually, wading through virtual mud, I skipped to the end and found it as predictably dull as the rest of the book. The only spark of magic was the moment when the heroine walks up into the woods for an illicit meeting with a lover and witnesses the leaves turning to flame.

It's sad to see one's favourite author losing the edge they had, particularly when their message has more relevance now than ever before. And one does wonder how much authors' work is being influenced these days by what their publishers want from them, rather than allowing them to write what they want. Please can I have Barbara Kingsolver back?

The beginning of this book was engaging and I was interested in the characters. But from one third through it became a bit of a polemic, and although I am a committed environmentalist, I became bored with the way the environmental issue took precedence over the characters, to the detriment of both. I felt as if I was being preached at.

I live in Africa and The Poison Wood Bible remains one of the best novels I have read. I was very keen to read this new work of Kingsolver's but about 1/4 way through began to get frustrated. The book needs a thorough edit. One gets the strong impression it was a rough first draft. There are far too many unnecessary and detailed descriptions - information that has little or nothing to do with the main plot . This only serves to distract ( in my case really irritate) the reader from a what could have been an excellent story. The heroine becomes less and less plausible as a character as the book progresses and, however much Kingsolver tries to bury her objective ( i.e educate about some of the more subtle impacts of climate change that will affect us all) it still comes out more as a lecture and not a piece of fiction. Very disappointing.