Flight Behavior / Barbara Kingsolver

The monarch butterfly of Eastern North America typically migrates thousands of miles in order to overwinter in the mountains of Mexico.  This journey is all the more miraculous since the route is completed by several generations of the insect (so there is no “memory” of the route by any single butterfly).  But this winter, in Kingsolver’s most recent work of fiction, Flight Behavior, due to fluctuating temperatures and other meteorological events tied to global warming, masses of orange monarchs drape the trees on the mountain overlooking the Turnbows’ farmstead in the Appalachian foothills of Tennessee.  Their sudden and unexpected appearance is seen as a sign of God by some, and a harbinger of environmental collapse by others.

Entomologist Ovid Byron comes to Feathertown, TN, to study the monarchs, and Kingsolver uses his voice to deliver sometimes preachy sermons on how man is destroying his natural surroundings.  (An interesting point that Kingsolver makes is that preserving the environment is often defined in terms that are class-based and elitist—she rather cleverly runs through a list of “things to do to save the world” and has her local protagonist discard them one by one—“Fly less?...  I never fly”. As if responsibility for saving the environment is only for those who can afford to give things up.)

I liked this story, but not enough.  Some of it dragged-- the scenes at the Dollar Store and the thrift store, for example, were just deadly, but maybe that’s because I consider an actual trip to these places an activity bordering on torture.

Barbara Kingsolver writes beautifully and her characters are well-developed, but sometimes the tension just wasn’t there.  By the end of the novel, things start moving again, and the final scene was almost Biblical in how it unfolded.  Reading Kingsolver is always rewarding, I just didn’t think that this effort was up to her usual standard.