This is by Barbara Kingsolver, and it was published in 2022.

It's only the second novel I've read by this author. The first was The Poisonwood Bible (1998). I read that in 2000, when our time in Africa (Cote d'Ivoire, in our case) was still fresh in our minds. My diary records that I found it "remarkable". It resonated with me on many levels.

Demon Copperhead came with so many recommendations that it was almost set up to fail... A reading friend spoke highly of it; in 2023, it won the Pulitzer Prize and the Women's Prize for Fiction; it was on all three of the lists that last year provided so many tips for good reading; and it's frequently recommended on Five Books.

On balance, I have to agree that the accolades are merited. It has facets that we might take issue with, but overall, this is a fine book.

I listened to the audio-version, narrated by Charlie Thurston, and he kept up the most brilliant work through every single one of the 21 hours it takes to read. This is a book that lends itself to being listened to. There's lots of dialogue, the language is very colloquial, and Thurston's rendering of the kinds of voices you're likely to hear in Lee County, in the Appalachian Mountains of Virginia, teleports you instantly there.



The plot of Demon Copperhead (which is the nickname of Damon Fields, our lead character) deliberately tracks that of Dickens's David Copperfield, an audio-adaptation of which I listened to quite recently, partly in preparation for reading this. You don't HAVE to have read Dickens's novel first, but if you do, it will definitely enhance your enjoyment of Kingsolver's story.

Given the book's avowed inspiration, I guess it's inevitable that many reviews get all caught up in comparing the merits of the two authors. That's unfair, I think. Kingsolver is not trying to be Dickens all over again.

But Demon himself should have the first word on the similarities: "Charles Dickens ... seriously old guy, dead and a foreigner, but Christ Jesus did he get the picture on kids and orphans getting screwed over and nobody giving a rat’s ass. You’d think he was from around here."

A quick review of the parallels will also serve to give us the key characters and plot points. A child is born to a woman who is on her own and struggling; the woman finds another partner, who is horrible to the child; eventually, the mother dies, and the boy is sent off to a succession of terrible places, meeting both villains and heroes on the way; growing up, the boy makes friends with a strong-willed, magnetic, and baneful character who is ultimately destroyed, but not before leading a weaker character to a very bad place; the boy discovers a talent that might be his ticket to a better future; and he partners first of all with a woman who is sweet but flaky, and then with a woman who has been close to him for much of his life, so that he realizes his real feelings for her only at the very end.

Another similarity is the way in which the often tragic content is leavened by the style. With David Copperfield, we have Dickens's trademark humour, arch, wry, and filled with caricature; with Demon Copperhead, we're engaged by the bravado with which our hero pumps his sharp, often smart-arse observations into a lugubrious but rollicking colloquial style. For instance (quoting John Mullan): "[As with Copperfield] the narrator of Demon Copperhead has also been told of the ill omens that accompanied his birth. 'If a mother is lying in her own piss and pill bottles while they’re slapping the kid she’s shunted out, telling him to look alive: likely the bastard is doomed.' This is a characteristic example of Demon’s vernacular. His sentiments are grim, but he proceeds with gusto." (Demon can also be genuinely funny, it has to be said.)


Airlie Beach, Queensland, Australia, 2007. Two reasons: One of Demon's dearest wishes is to see the sea, and at the very end, after two abortive attempts, he's off to the seaside with Angus, originally known as Agnes, who suddenly is more to him than just a substitute sister. Also, one of the ways in which Kingsolver's plot has to deviate from that of Dickens is that she can't realistically pack all those characters in need of a fresh start off to Australia...

Which brings us to the differences.

Mullan also tells us that Kingsolver, in her acknowledgments (which you don't generally get with audio-books), thanks Dickens for "his impassioned critique of institutional poverty and its damaging effects on children in his society", and adds: "Those problems are still with us."

But David Copperfield, as Mullan points out, was much more than social critique. True, the lead character struggled through various periods of poverty. But he progresses quite nicely, and his upward trajectory takes him to a very stable place. Demon's final position -- though looking positive -- is still far from certain.

There are other minor deviations from the characterization of the original. David's Micawbers, for example, are much more amicable than Demon's McCobbs (which I think is perhaps a pity). On the other hand, Demon's Angus is a much feistier, much more interesting character than David's Agnes, who was (in characteristic Dickens fashion) noble but insipid.

The main difference, though, is the key element that backgrounds all Demon's struggles. It's the opioid crisis. His mother was using when he was born; as he grows up, she's in and out of rehab; she eventually ODs, but not before she's brought the dreadful Stoner into the household. One of Demon's string of temporary homes brings him into contact with Sterling Ford, nicknamed Fast Forward, who introduces his associates to recreational drug use as just something you do.

But it's not until Demon ends up with Coach Winfield that he sinks into the drug scene for real. Coach is essentially a good guy, but he has his own line in exploitation. Previous foster-arrangements have flat-out taken advantage of Demon for work (in the tobacco fields, or in a shop where his duties morph into doing jobs for the next-door meth lab), but Coach spots that his protege has all the makings of a good football player (American football, that is). Which is fine by Demon, and way more enjoyable and prestigious than the other things he's had to do to make a dime. Except that he has a terrible on-field accident, which wrecks his knee. And he is prescribed OxyContin.

The first indication I had of the scale and awfulness of the opioid problem was Ocean Vuong's On Earth We Are Briefly Gorgeous. The protagonist there, Little Dog, meets Trevor when they're both working on a tobacco farm (another connection with Demon). Trevor dies of an overdose at the age of 22. He broke his ankle when he was 15, and was prescribed OxyContin: "After a month on the Oxy, Trevor's ankle healed, but he was a full-blown addict." He's not the only one: "Seven of my friends are dead," Little Dog tells us, "Four from overdoses. Five, if you count Xavier who flipped his Nissan doing ninety on a bad batch of fentanyl. I don't celebrate my birthday any more."



Well, it's the same story here. The drugs contain Demon's pain. But as he's pressured to get back on the field, he keeps taking more (because he keeps being prescribed more). So he becomes addicted. And he's slowly sucked into the whole business of getting prescription meds (often via dodgy doctors), and then selling under the counter to get money for enough food to keep body and soul vaguely connected -- and for more drugs. Demon's first girlfriend, Dory, has ready access to pain meds because of her father's illness. When he dies, she soon descends into addiction, and her life too ends in an overdose. Emmy, the granddaughter in a family that has been really kind to Demon, is sucked into Fast Forward's orbit, and also into the drug-taking scene.

The book offers an amalgam of explanations for the sad pull of drugs. It's a complex business, and I found Kingsolver's depiction both moving and revealing. She sees herself very much as an "advocate for Appalachia": "These are my people. I’m Appalachian; that’s my identity. This is home. This is the place and these are the people that I love who make me who I am, who make me happy to be alive."

So her portrayal is sympathetic. Which is not to say that she paints them all as angels. There's racism and sexism aplenty. But they still retain very solid qualities of resilience and community, and these facets tend not to be recognized by nationally dominant groups biassed by their prejudices, and obsessed with the bottom line. Because not only have Appalachian communities gone through the wringer with the decline of the tobacco and coal industries, but they constantly find themselves the butt of hillbilly stereotypes and patronizing comment. "Appalachia," says William Nash, "is a region that, for generations, has been subjected to economic oppression, classist stereotyping and environmental and medical recklessness. The pumping of opioids into rural communities represents just another chapter in this story of exploitation. Yet artists and writers like Kingsolver are able to show that the people in the region are more than just backward, powerless victims -- that they are complicated people with the same goals, longings and fears as the rest of us."



***

Demon Copperhead is heavy reading/listening at times. Not in the sense of being hard-going (it rattles along beautifully), but in the sense of confronting you with lots of pain. Some readers don't like that. My view is that it's fairly well balanced. A ton of shit happens in this book (as it does in life); but we are also introduced to plenty of good people, who genuinely care about others, and who are doing their best (albeit sometimes a slightly misguided best); and Demon does get his lucky breaks.

The book also winds up those who dislike "protest fiction" per se. I see nothing wrong with this genre, providing it's still providing us with literature as opposed to polemic or propaganda. Yes, Demon Copperhead is a little obviously didactic in places, but the instructional elements (all based around characters and what they're discovering or feel strongly about) didn't overly impede the verve and pace of the story.

More pertinent, I think, is the charge that in portraying these struggling, drug-ravaged characters, Kingsolver is perpetuating the existing stereotypes of Appalachia. It's always a tricky one, this. My view in Kingsolver's case is that her narrative is strong enough to carry us over this hurdle. There's sufficient roundness to all the key characters for us to see them as people, not just as types; there are plenty of characters who should (if we were following the stereotype) have ended up in the gutter, and haven't; and Demon's upward trajectory (by the end he has gone through rehab, is busy drawing, and finds Angus) illustrates that some people manage to buck every trend. And Kingsolver's genuine passion does shine through, I think. She's not just a voyeur who's creating sensation for sensation's sake. She's someone who has seen up close this evil that has befallen the region she loves.



Kingsolver's "voice" is amazing. Of course I can't really judge how accurately she renders the combo of elements that makes up our young, male, working-class, Melungeon protagonist (Melungeons have a mixture of European, Native American, and African ancestry). But what she has produced is consistent and plausible. And those who know the environment intimately testify to its authenticity.

I haven't come across that many cries of appropriation with regard to her taking on the role of a Melungeon boy (it comes up a little, eg, here). Her response to this issue is to write "from the inside" only when it’s a culture she knows well: "With Demon Copperhead, it’s an Appalachian novel, and I’m Appalachian, so I feel rock-solid entitled to tell this story." And as far as honing the voice is concerned, that's just hard yakka: "I had to really think about, through draft after draft after draft -- because that’s the way I work -- really shaping that voice. I really want you to want to adopt this kid, to get you on his side. And then by the end, I think you’re probably just as mad as he is at the way our country has failed him. And that’s the goal. But... how do you do it? You just do it. That’s the work. That’s what I do at this desk every day is work and work and work and redraft until the voice just is as clear on the page as it is the way I hear it in my head."

What the book does supremely well is make you realize how terrible it is to be a child without the anchor-point of a stable family. As Demon puts it: "A kid is a terrible thing to be, in charge of nothing."

I thought Elizabeth Lowry summed up the book's impact very poignantly: "David Copperfield wonders 'whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own life'. Demon Copperhead poses a different question: what is heroism, anyway? When you’re a child born into a life without choices, this powerful reworking suggests, being a hero sometimes consists simply of surviving against the odds."



***

Where opioids are concerned, the problem has not gone away. Art Van Zee, who sounded the alarm more than two decades ago, comments: "There were so many missed opportunities. So many times it could have been stopped. Now, I don’t see how it ends... I trace this back to OxyContin and the opioid problem because it brought this huge number of people in our region into the substance-using world, and for so many years good treatment wasn’t available. But now we’ve got methamphetamine, and fentanyl more recently. It’s much worse than I imagined it would ever be, and the lessons haven’t been learned... The human cost and what’s happened in our region is not easily repaired." (Read the rest of that article, it's an eye-opener on the baleful impact of a powerful pharmaceutical company on a region with a "mix of ageing laborers with worn-out bodies seeking pain relief and young people looking for escape", and -- in a way that Kingsolver's story has prepared us for -- flags the quadrupling of the number of children in Lee County taken into care or fostered during the early years of the opioid crisis.)

Kingsolver used royalties from book sales to set up a recovery residence for women who are seeking long-term recovery from addiction. Book groups have supported this project.

She's also very clear about the political impact of the long-standing disparagement and condescension that Appalachians have had to put with: "Trump ... is the guy who says: 'I’m not like them. I’m not a fancy educated guy. I’m one of you.' That’s what appealed to people. Shame is such a part of this. He got under people’s sense of shame and found other places to put it." But she's good at separating Trump-supporters in her neighbourhood ("some of the most generous kindhearted people you will ever meet") from Trump himself ("it's stunning how much damage one ignorant man can do...").

And wherever we live, this is certainly a book that makes us take a good look at ourselves, and our attitudes, and the way our societies work.