However, it is the issue of climate change that hangs, unspoken, over proceedings and it is left to Ovid Byron to give it resonance. Only the last of these encounters works satisfactorily. I don't have enough money to buy a computer that I might then leave on overnight and waste power, she snarls at her chagrined inquisitor. Later, Dellarobia is quizzed by a self-righteous eco-campaigner about her lifestyle, only to discover that her poverty makes her just about the lowest possible emitter of carbon in the United States.

Two lengthy scenes are devoted to shopping visits to low-rent supermarkets in which the family's financial tribulations are outlined in unflinching detail. Much is also made of the Turnbows' poverty, almost to the point of overkill. Even Cub, her much put-upon simpleton of a husband, and his dreadful, manipulative mother Hester, are ultimately accorded sympathy. Dellarobia and her kin come over as solid but believable individuals, outlined with respect and balance. It is complex, elliptical and well-observed. In general, Flight Behaviour is an impressive work. Yet the forces set loose in this way will be nothing to those that will be sweep the world as it gets warmer and warmer, Kingsolver is telling us. It is a story steeped in biblical metaphor: the monarch butterflies transform the land as if 'trees have turned to fire, a burning bush' lambs are raised for slaughter, the Turnbows' principal business as farmers and ultimately the onset of spring soaks the land in a flood of Old Testament proportions. Entomologist Ovid Byron, a gifted African-American researcher who comes to investigate, puts the blame on a very different agent: climate change.īyron hires Dellarobia to help him to make sense of the strange apparition on her land and in the process of learning how to help him, she acquires a self-confidence she had been denied by her lack of education and by her poverty.

Locals view their arrival as a message from God. For monarchs to attempt to overwinter far from the heat of the south is unprecedented. The monarchs' majestic, and mysterious, appearance distracts Dellarobia from her illicit assignation and in the process, the would-be 'Tennessee temptress' achieves internet fame as the discoverer of a phenomenon that confounds human understanding of butterfly migration.

Flight Behaviour by Barbara Kingsolver