Barbara Kingsolver - a biologist writes

The other night I went with Roz to the Southbank, where I have not ventured for some time, due to my difficult job eating up my life, and we ate in the British Film Institute, had some wine and saw Barbara Kingsolver, all of which cheered me up a lot.

BK is so gifted. I won't go through all the books she has written but the most famous is called The Poisonwood Bible, which everyone should read as it asks some very important questions about an extreme clash of cultures, which in this case is placed in the Congo. She wrote this book having actually lived in Africa as a child. Unlike most people, she has first hand experience to share. It's a very disturbing novel and I have not yet fathomed out its implications.

She said that she writes only about places she has been to and experienced. At present, I am reading one of her books, The Lacuna, which is set largely in Mexico, so she has been there, but not in the 1930's, which is when the action is taking place. Never mind, she has entered into the mind of the probably unreliable narrator (a gay man) and created a world for us where Lev Trotsky, exiled and in danger of assassination, with his wife and staff, goes to live with the artists Diego Rivera and Frieda Kahlo. 

The latest book, Flight Behaviour, from which she read, is set in her familiar Kentucky hills and is about love and growth (of course), monarch butterflies and climate change, which is the truth Barbara is commissioned to share. The life cycle of the monarch butterfly is a miraculous thing and the fragility of something beautiful and extraordinary is a perfect example of her message. She is a biologist with a load of qualifications and has some splendid academic colleagues, who, she told us, have read her work for scientific credibility and given it the thumbs up. 

She seems like a very happy person, at home in her life and happy to be feted in London as well as many other cities, I suppose. It bothers me that there were few men in the audience. It was almost 100% women. It is bad that half of a cosmopolitan population is not clued up about  work that is significant thematically, and not just to women. Most of her books are for either sex, but I am not sure that Prodigal Summer would appeal to a man. It's too much like a female fantasy.