Review of Unsheltered by Barbara Kingsolver

"People can change their minds about little things but on the big ones, they'd rather die first. A used-up planet scares the piss out of them, after they spent their whole lives thinking the cupboard would never go bare."

It's incredibly hard to write a novel on Current Issues without making it sound like a lecture or a sermon. One mistake many authors make is to forget that the heart of a novel, the reason readers persist with it, is never The Issues but rather the characters: if these are no more than a peg to hang issues on, readers will soon be off elsewhere.

Kingsolver is too old a hand to make this error: it would be very hard not to get involved with Willa, wondering why, when she and her husband have done everything "right" – steady jobs, family, etc – they now, in 2016, haven't a spare penny to bless themselves with and stop their house falling down. Or with Thatcher Greenwood, in 1871, trapped in the wrong marriage and trying to teach proper science in a school whose principal still believes in Noah's Ark.

For Thatcher lived over a century before Willa, albeit on the same plot of land, and their stories alternate and interlace. This is the other device whereby Kingsolver manages to come at her message obliquely rather than head-on. One thing Thatcher and Willa have in common is that both live in times when people are frightened of the new and try to cling to old certainties, even when this means ignoring evidence and trusting to faith, or instinct. But it is Thatcher, back in 1871, who witnesses a demonstration against a Darwinist in Boston:

the crude effigy dangling from a noose, the monkey's tail pinned to the stuffed trousers, the murderous crowd chanting Lock him up!

and Thatcher's boss who begins little notes with "Fact!" before citing lies.

Thatcher and Willa do not seek intellectual shelter in comforting myths, but they cling to other, emotional, shelters: he to a marriage that is going nowhere and she to the hope of financial security for her family (and incidentally, if British readers ever doubted the importance of the NHS, Kingsolver's account of Willa's problems getting care for her ailing father-in-law should convince them). Even Willa's daughter Tig (short for Antigone, her father is Greek), who has figured out that there is little point in getting attached to material things when "the world is running out of the stuff we need", is not immune from seeking shelter in caring for her half-orphaned infant nephew. Without shelter, the novel says, we stand in daylight, but we also feel extremely vulnerable. The only person in the novel who arguably does do without shelter of any kind is Thatcher's scientist friend Mary Treat (an historical person).

Willa's security is in material possessions, what her daughter calls "stuff", and not till close to the end does she realise that the more stuff there is, the better chance that whatever of it really matters will get lost, swallowed up in the mass of the inconsequential.  It would be wrong to betray to potential readers how the various protagonists eventually decide to confront their problems. I will say one thing. I have heard some folk who have been listening to the radio dramatisation, which I've been avoiding since I hadn't yet read the book, and who have been disappointed. Don't judge the book by the adaptation.  It's the first novel I have read which not only addresses recent political events but reaches beyond them to what Tig, representing a new generation, sees as the root cause, a world no longer adequate to the consumer demands being made on it:

"There's a lot of white folks out there hanging on to their God-given right to look down on some other class of people. They feel it slipping away and they're scared. […] Total fantasy. I mean, look around, who do you see that's living la vida white man? Really it's just down to a handful of guys piling up everything they can grab and sitting on top of it. And a million poor jerks like Papu still hoping they can get into the club. How long can that last?"

Just as she did in The Lacuna, Kingsolver has written a Great American Novel for our time, but not just for America. It is both powerful and uncomfortable, because the solution, if there still is one, doesn't just involve changing one set of politicians for another, but rather one lifestyle and set of life goals for another.