Memorable story about change

FLIGHT BEHAVIOUR Barbara Kingsolver Faber & Faber

REVIEW: Aly Verbaan

THE ONLY constant thing in life is change. The problem is that change is often difficult, sometimes heart-wrenching, and more and more commonly these days, devastating. The novel’s prose is complex, heavily seasoned with adjectives, similes and metaphors, but also simple, flowing lyrically.

Our introduction to the story’s protagonist, Dellarobia Turnbow, situates her as a simple small-town Tennessee girl whose choices have all been made for her. She dithers indecisively in an indifferent marriage. She is the young mother of two small children, the wife of one child-like husband, and the obedient daughter-in-law of one tyrannical matriarch.

She is the product of a town whose schoolchildren see the prospect of college as irrelevant. Things happen to Dellarobia, she doesn’t make things happen. It takes a force of nature – a mountain of fire and a displaced population of monarch butterflies – to bring real change into her life.

The herald of change is Dr Ovid Byron, a lepidopterist who follows the colony of butterflies. He seems to be everything Dellarobia is not; a complex being of whom she is in awe. He is highly educated, cultured, and brings in his wake a portable laboratory of highly technical scientific equipment and an entourage of college students and graduates.

It is at that most simple level of human interaction, the level of the name, that Ovid and Dellarobia begin to find some common ground. Ovid surprises Dellarobia with the revelation that her own name is as reminiscent of the high arts as his own. Slowly but surely, Ovid and the other scientists find that Dellarobia has hidden talents and a useful, practical kind of knowledge that they lack; and Dellarobia finds that science involves a lot of mundane, repetitive tasks she can help with, picking up more and more complex scientific knowledge as she spends time with the scientists who have landed, like the butterflies, in her backyard. What at first seems simple is actually complex, and what appears complex is essentially simple.

In art as in life, the most simple and the most complex characters are the children. Flight Behaviour contains two of the most authentically realised child characters since To Kill a Mockingbird. Preston and Cordelia are beguiling reminders that there is no such thing as a “normal child”. Fiveyear-old Preston is solemn, inquisitive, often shy, but occasionally exuberant about his new favourite subject, monarch butterflies. Like a lot of small children, Preston is canny at recognising an adult worthy of a child’s hero-worship, which he bestows upon Ovid at their first meeting. Preston’s bookishness and scientific fervour make him the oracle of his kindergarten class in all things butterfly-related.

Dellarobia’s youngest child, Cordelia, is loud, brash, supremely self-confident, and delightfully funny, providing much of the book’s comic relief. Not surprisingly, a good deal of the story’s poignancy comes from these vivid, wise, and wilful children. Dellarobia’s dread that Preston will grow up in a future without animals, a future rendered unrecognisable by climate change, is a most moving, real account of our impending doom.

The simplest truth of all is that Flight Behaviour lives or dies depending on the reader’s ability to identify with its complicated protagonist.

Flight Behaviour succeeds so emphatically because Dellarobia is every human, and every corner of her world becomes accessible through her. While the author’s warning of impending climatedriven calamity is blatantly obvious, it is Dellarobia who translates complicated global scientific concepts into local, familiar terms that she, and we, can fully appreciate. It is Dellarobia who much more subtly demonstrates that in the shadow of the global changes that occupy our collective mind, small changes also occur around us: children grow up, people we have underestimated surprise us, relationships strengthen or break down, people’s lives change direction, faith is lost or found.

Ultimately, Kingsolver leaves us with the most important question of all: “What was the use of saving a world that had no soul left in it? Continents without butterflies, seas without coral reef… What if all human effort amounted basically to saving a place for ourselves to park?” The interconnectedness of all nature’s creatures is a message that is sure to live on in the reader’s mind.

What was the use of saving a world that had no soul left in it?