Barbara Kingsolver may effect the future of the world with her writing. Over the years she has written complex, provocative novels about world and national issues, from white missionaries in Africa (her masterpiece The Poisonwood Bible) to the plight of Native-Americans (The Bean Tree Trilogy) to The Warren Commission's persecution of suspected communists (The Lacuna). Literature that teaches to question the world, that deals in the profound give meaning to our lives, and this social commentary is one of the reasons I read Kingsolver and other contemporary authors authors like Jonathan Franzen and Chang Rae Lee.
So it may seem unfair, then, to tax Flight Behavior with being too didactic. The fault lies, I suspect, in the characters. Especially in the beginning of the novel, they are unappealing. They seem selfish, wrapped up in their own complaints. The protagonist, Dellarobia, is actually on her way to an assignation with "The telephone man," not her own husband, when we first meet her and when her path in the world is changed forever by the sight that appears miraculous, but is ironically an incontrovertible evidence of climate warming, eventual doom for the ecology of our planet. Dellarobia is hard to like at first, and some readers may give up on the book before she has had a chance to evolve.
As Dellarobia fully absorbs the double-sided coin of her "miracle" she evolves and grows as a character, becoming inspired to change her own life and to work within the scientific field she has developed a passion for, at last finding a passion within her own intellect rather than being emotionally seduced by another man.
Another interesting facet of Flight Behavior is that the Appalachian farmers who rely on the seasonal functions of the earth (ruled by its climate) can offer multiple proofs of climate change to refute the arguments that politicians and their paid scientists sell to the public. As our people have moved farther and farther away from the tie to the planet that farming provides, we have less direct knowledge of the earth and notice the changes less. This novel is set on a farm that has been in the same family for generations, and knowledge about the plants and animals of the area have been passed down from farmer to farmer.
Flight Behavior was described in some reviews as Science Fiction, but it is set only a few years in the future, and the effects of climate change depicted seem utterly plausible; not fantastic or unlikely at all... tragically.
