Flight Behavior by Barbara Kingsolver
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
**spoiler alert** Barbara Kingsolver’s book, Flight Behavior, provides her with a familiar and Appalachian-inspired canvas from which to convey her passionate concerns for the effects of global warming and climate change. She does this through the use of her main character, Dellarobia Turnbow’s, unexpected run-in with a huge mass of monarch butterflies while walking up a mountain on her way to act upon her urge to go outside of her marriage with another man after becoming severely bored and unhappy with her life’s circumstances. Not wearing her glasses, she’s unable to determine what the swarm of monarchs is and turns back taking it as a heavenly sign that what she is doing is wrong. Returning to her family, she becomes aware of her father-in-law’s plans to sign a logging contract that will allow the same trees upon which the monarch butterflies have become dependent, to be cut down. Hearing about the monarch phenomenon, Ovid, a scientist who has been researching and studying monarchs for years, comes to the Turnbow’s land to monitor the butterflies and attempt to determine what might be the cause for their highly unusual choice of roosting place in the southern Appalachians. Feeling that there must be some higher purpose for the butterflies alighting on her family’s property, Dellarobia’s curiosity gets the better of her and she soon finds herself assisting Ovid and his team of student-scientists with their time-sensitive mission to collect as much data as possible before the impending winter, threatening to wipe the monarchs out, arrives. During the time she assists with studying the monarchs, Dellarobia begins to question everything in earnest. Her exposure to Ovid and his team only intensifies her longing to be something other than what she has become and to be somewhere other than where she is. She finds herself drawn to Ovid and admires his passion for his work and how learned he is. Over time, she begins to realize that she made a mistake in marrying Cub, her husband, simply because she had gotten pregnant at seventeen. Her impulse to free herself from what she now realizes to be a self-imposed situation, becomes too strong to ignore. Finally, just like the monarch butterflies veering off course in the Appalachians, she reaches a point where she can no longer remain static and held hostage by her circumstances and spreads her wings in flight, moving into an apartment of her own. Kingsolver ends Flight Behavior with a scene in which Dellarobia looks to the sky and watches the monarchs fly away to “a new earth” (Kingsolver, Flight Behavior).
Flight Behavior demonstrates and further solidifies Kingsolver’s widely known passion for issues surrounding global warming and climate change. Much of the dialogue in the book focuses around these issues and while they provide Dellarobia an education of sorts, they also encourage and inspire her (and hopefully readers) to become more aware and proactive in the struggle to curtail global warming. Flight Behavior touches on the loss of polar ice and the coral reefs, shrinking glaciers, droughts, diminishing numbers of fish in the ocean, lowering one’s carbon footprint, using less fossil fuel, reducing one’s red meat intake, driving less or using a bicycle, the use of energy efficient appliances, flying less, etc., all of which are very relevant to the issues we face today. Kingsolver warns us as to the seriousness of our continued disregard for climate change with Ovid’s explanation to Dellarobia, “It will only take a few degrees of change, global average, to knock our kind out of the running” (Kingsolver, Flight Behavior). It’s very clear that Flight Behavior is written as a warning and with the intent of waking us up to the realities of climate change and global warming that we now face.
Kingsolver brings Flight Behavior to life through her use of detailed and vivid imagery. She consistently and determinedly provides exquisite details on each and every scene throughout the book, “It was practically nothing, a fleck of orange wobbling above the trees. It crossed overhead and drifted to the left, where the hill dropped steeply from the trail” (Kingsolver, Flight Behavior). Her ability to create imagery through the use of intimate and specific details effectively draws the reader into the book’s scenes.
Flight Behavior also demonstrates Kingsolver’s uncanny ability to write the way people actually talk. She clearly draws upon her own Appalachian background and by not holding back, she keeps things real. As in real life, she creates characters who are not always tactful and who can be blunt and to the point. Being from Kentucky myself, I appreciated this and oftentimes laughed aloud when reading things like, “You looked bookoo hot” (Kingsolver, Flight Behavior). This aspect of Kingsolver’s writing style enables her characters and the interactions amongst them to come across as very authentic.
One of the more-noticeable themes Kingsolver uses in Flight Behavior is the different ways people within Dellarobia’s community chose to interpret the circumstances surrounding the monarch butterflies. The initial tendency of many was to somehow link it to religion or to view it as the work of a higher power. As is often the case when a phenomenon occurs that is seemingly unexplainable, people tried to say it had to be of God’s hand, “Why a major portion of the monarch population that has overwintered in Mexico since God set it loose there, as you say, would instead aggregate in the southern Appalachians, for the first time in recorded history, on the farm of family Turnbow” (Kingsolver, Flight Behavior). This continued to be the case with many of the locals even after Ovid and his team of student-scientists began to more fully understand and explain what was actually happening. Kingsolver does a good job carrying this theme throughout the book’s entirety and even portrays some of the characters, such as Dellarobia’s mother-in-law Hester, as a noted and always on, god-fearing character.
While a little long-winded at times, Kingsolver’s book, Flight Behavior, is an interesting and inspirational story from which we can all learn something. Kingsolver not only provides us the story of Dellarobia’s liberating journey, she also provides the parallel story of the monarch butterflies with the more important purpose of highlighting the effects of global warning and climate change.
I would recommend Barbara Kingsolver’s book, Flight Behavior, to anyone interested in the issues surround global warming and climate change but also who enjoy reading a good story. I would also recommend the book to those not yet convinced of the realities and effects of global warming and climate change.
James
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