Outrage transposed

Much has been written about Charles Dickens‘ novel David Copperfield. Ir is his most autobiographical, it is a study of child poverty and abuse, it is about loss and death, and, I suppose, a novel that begins with a birth, is inevitably heading that way. Barbara Kingsolver goes for the outrage that is expressed on every page. In Dickens it lies in names, incidents and detail and so it does in Kingsolver.

Demon Copperhead is a riff on the Dickens, right up to the similar names and beyond, but transposed to twenty-first century America, the Appalachia. Lee County the dog-end of America. Damon is born in a trailer, parked on a lot that belongs to the Peggots. He and Maggot (Matthew) Peggot hang out together a lot, go to school together and are “besties” for a while. Damon’s mother is a drug addict and alcoholic, his father dead. Mum shacks up with Stoner, who dislikes Maggot (a gay child obviously and therefore a bad influence) and also finds Damon difficult. Then Mum overdoses and that’s it, Demon is put into childcare foster home while Mum is in rehab – if you have read David Copperfield you will see where this is going…

To understand where Barbara Kingsolver is going with this does not take many pages. This is about poverty, about the absolute poverty of the land poor in a part of the world where struggle is endemic; it is about the neglect of the social services and it is absolutely and profoundly about the opioid crisis. Throughout the book you can pick up the references to Dickens’ novel, but Dickens’ was concerned with the poverty, not with the gin addiction. Kingsolver is about the drug companies that promoted opioids for pain, depression and everything in between in a place where these were the conditions. This was a field day for the drug companies, these people were so dirt poor that they would take anything to make the misery go away.

This is a masterpiece of writing, a polemic dressed as a resoundingly good narrative full of characters that you want to get to know, in situations that are heart-breaking and also believable; and there is death, loss, love and all that driving the story along, and the appalling effect on child and adult alike. The outrage is palpable – Kingsolver is right to use the Dickens as a matrix, hopefully it will drive readers back to the original (myself included) or knowledge of the original will drive readers to Demon Copperhead, either way a win-win.