![]() ![]() Hundreds, thousands, of monarch butterflies, driven off their annual course by climate change. ![]() What she discovers instead, as she flees the scene of her would-be tryst before it has even begun, turns out to be a far more substantial agent of change: butterflies. We first meet Dellarobia, who over the course of almost six hundred pages grows confounding and difficult in the way all the best-realised characters must, on one of the slopes of Appalachia, about to meet her adulterous lover. Flight Behaviour has a great deal to recommend it – and yet I left it somehow unsatisfied. ![]() It is a big book in terms of its purpose as well as its girth, since its preoccupations of class and climate change feel vital and urgent it is delicately written and keenly imagined, in particular finding a rare kind of demotic poetry in its description of the natural world. Nominated for the Women’s Prize alongside such hyped heavyweights as Hilary Mantel’s Bring Up The Bodies and Zadie Smith’s NW, Kingsolver’s eighth novel for large parts of its not-inconsiderable length more than competes in that much-heralded company: indeed, at times it is more humane and gentle than Mantel, more unified and singular than Smith. ![]() Like its protagonist Dellarobia, a bored Appalachian housewife and mother of two who has grown frustrated and unfulfilled by the narrow experiences offered to her by past choices and present obligations, Barbara Kingsolver’s Flight Behaviour undergoes something of an identity crisis. ![]()
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