Flight Behaviour

I am really enjoying this book. However, it doesn't seem, yet, to be about climate change and butterflies, and you would think the writer was a sociologist for the way she so carefully places Dellarobia, the heroine, between two worldviews, like a middle class mind in a working class life, subtly judging everyone around her. The character gives the writer (Barbara Kingsolver) such a prime opportunity to look into the business of the poorer end of her neighbourhood and examine it with the exactitude of a dissecting biologist, that I feel slightly squirmy about it. It feels snobby, but it is very well done.

The situation on the Appalachian mountain, where it has been too warm and they have had too much rain, is just like here. In the book, the worry is that the rain is going to cause a landslide. But there are other problems too, the hay the farmers cut goes mouldy, for example, and they have to buy some in from another state, adding to their cash-flow problems. (Here, there are just too many pathogens: mould, growths and fungus. The country won't look the same without the ash trees, but they are not the only plants suffering die back. My brother showed me some old laurels that he had to saw down. the Wisley website reports a list of pathogens which is enough to make your hair curl, there are so many new ones.)

As the story develops there is more to the climate change angle, and one of the characters, a professor from the Caribbean, becomes a mouthpiece for the climate change scientists, and there are whole pages of his explanations of the signs and consequences of climate change. He rather loses his personality and becomes a talking book, in my opinion. But never mind. There is a lovely scene where he is brought face to face with a journalist and lambasts her for not giving priority to the story that is important, the story that will change the world, and instead going for the feelgood story, the soft story, the story they can sex up a bit. Distractions, in other words.

 There is also a cultural rift between the ordinary folk and the scientists that we don't have in the UK. The Appalachian folk believe that God is good and will sort things out for them, and they really have no tradition of a scientific approach to anything. Science goes with expensive things like Goretex jackets and a university education.

The butterflies are extraordinary. They need to hibernate on a cool mountain, in Mexico, but if it's too cool they freeze and die. They wake up in the spring and mate. The female has to lay her eggs on some milkweed. That's the only thing the caterpillars eat. So that's in Texas or somewhere like that. Then that generation of butterflies goes north again. They go to Canada eventually I think they breed again and another generation flies south to Mexico. So the question is, how do they know when to fly and how far, 2,000 miles to a Mexican mountain?

Here is a lovely video showing the problems the butterflies face

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.