![]() ![]() Has Kingsolver matched Dickens’s achievement? Time and the critics will tell, but one dares to think that perhaps she has. To reimagine David Copperfield plausibly requires both total immersion in the work that Dickens himself called his “favourite child”, and a creative gift equal to his own. It is the latter text that provides the template for Kingsolver’s novel. Its literary predecessors include Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre, William Wordsworth’s The Prelude, and, most famously, Charles Dickens’s David Copperfield. Now, in a new novel of immense power, she returns to the dark places of childhood and adolescence, mapping a territory that many have experienced but few dare recall.ĭemon Copperhead is a Bildungsroman: a narrative of an individual’s formation. Her best-known novel, The Poisonwood Bible, is, among much else, a demand that we take to heart what children born on religion’s lunatic fringe have to suffer. Much of her work explores the afflictions of the hard-done-by, not least the misery of the children of dysfunctional families. BARBARA KINGSOLVER is among the great storytellers of our time. ![]()
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