Cultural Dessert

'Demon Copperhead' by Barbara Kingsolver

8 March 2024

As I have mentioned here before, I found the Hogarth Shakespeare series of books, in which contemporary novelists re-imagined Shakespeare plays, a bit cringe-worthy (with the exception of ‘Hag-Seed: The Tempest Retold’ by Margaret Atwood, reviewed here in January 2022). So, despite many people recommending it, I came to ‘Demon Copperhead’, Barbara Kingsolver’s retelling of ‘David Copperfield’ with some trepidation. But, while ‘Demon Copperhead’ (as the title signifies) is another example of a loosely disguised classic tale in a modern setting, with clever contemporary variations of the character names, I thought it worked extremely well. I think this is because Barbara Kingsolver is interested in updating both Dickens’ story and his exposé of social problems. Her first-person narrator Damon Fields tells the story of his difficult childhood in Lee County, Virginia, in the 1990s. He is born to a drug-using teenage single mother in a trailer, passes in and out of foster care and experiences trauma and tragedy at a very young age. In front of this bleak backdrop, Barbara Kingsolver paints an engaging cast of Dickensian characters to create what feels like it is going to be an entertaining coming of age story about overcoming adversity through friendship. But Kingsolver’s underlying theme is America’s opioid crisis and seeing Demon (and most of his contemporaries) descending into over reliance on drugs and addiction feels painfully real and distressing. ‘Demon Copperhead’ is a brilliantly written novel: it is a tribute to Kingsolver’s skill that you soon forget the Dickens parallel and get sucked into the modern tragedy of a generation lost to drugs. The second half of the novel becomes increasingly uncomfortable reading but it is a compelling commentary on a shameful episode in our recent history of which Charles Dickens would have been proud.

Labels: Books

posted by Robin Simpson @ 11:16 am