HIP REVIEW: Demon Copperhead
By Barbara Kingsolver
Published by Faber 2022
REVIEW BY KATE WATERS
I have just read and greatly enjoyed this excellent book Demon Copperhead by the American novelist Barbara Kingsolver (available from Hastings Library). It is a re-working of Charles Dickens’ David Copperfield, the story of a young boy’s life, but set in Lee County Virginia in the 1990s and 2000s. The book begins with the traumatic birth of Demon (real name Damon Fields) in a run-down trailer park to a teenage mother addicted to drugs and alcohol. His father has already died in an accident. So begins his odyssey through a life of poverty, struggle, and prejudice; and yet the quality of the writing is such that the story is often both tragic, poignant, funny, and enthralling all at once.
One of the mainstays of his life which helps the young Demon to survive is the long-suffering but warm and loving household of the Peggot family who run the trailer park and often provide a substitute home for the boy. When he is 10 years old Demon’s mother marries a violent bullying man who asserts his control over both mother and son and seeks to isolate him from the Peggot’s support. The battle of wills between the man and boy is excellently presented through Demon’s eyes and movingly portrays the precariousness of a young child’s existence in a hostile world.
His mother’s overdose propels Demon into the arms of the State and describes his encounters with social workers and others in authority from a child’s point of view: the jaded burnt-out professionals, the idealistic but naïve young social worker, afraid herself of the overbearing morose ‘foster carer’ that she leaves Demon with. He finds himself as slave labour on a backwoods farm, sustained by the camaraderie of three other boys placed (or imprisoned) there and his first taste of illicit drug use to dull the pain. His hopes of a return home are dashed when his mother, now pregnant, dies from another overdose.
ECHOES OF THE RAGGED TROUSERED PHILANTHROPISTS
Demon has many other adventures and encounters as he fights his way to adulthood. The story is also about the grim realities of rural, post-industrial America. The Appalachian Mountain region was once a great coal mining area which fuelled the factories of the north. The book describes how the mining companies suppressed the development of other industries to ensure a plentiful labour force with no competition, and then kept the schools poorly resourced to stifle ambition in the young people other than to work in a mine. Nevertheless, the people look back to this era as the ‘good times’ when they had work and money, although a voucher system meant they often had to spend their wages in the company shop – echoes of The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists there.
The 1980s brought modernisation to the mining industry that meant they no longer needed legions of workers to toil underground, they blew the tops off the mountains and employed a few giant machines to scrape up the coal. Mass redundancies and unemployment meant depression and poverty and the area became the butt of jokes and scorn about ‘hillbillies’ and ‘rednecks’ as it remains today. In the wake of despair came the drugs epidemic, both illegal, and legal in the form of Oxycontin. The book examines these themes through the lives of the characters. Aunt June Peggot is a nurse who dates a sleazy Purdue drug salesman. Demon himself, his promising career as an Highschool American Football star cut short by a knee injury, is led into opiate addiction by an unscrupulous team doctor. Demon and his ethereal girlfriend Dori descend into the squalor and desperation of drug abuse, painting a moving picture of his attempts to get clean undermined by his desire to save her from pain and distress by scoring more drugs.
ITS MESSAGE IS ONE OF RESILIENCE SURVIVAL AND HOPE
This is a big novel with many other characters and events that explore the themes of social deprivation: the exploitation and manipulation of the poor, the prejudice and stereotyping that they have to suffer in both the media and society at large. Yet its message is one of resilience, survival, and hope. We meet Mr Ghali, for example, an Indian shop keeper who gets a thrill from handing his customers their take-aways. He was born into the Dalit (untouchable) caste in his home country and physical contact of this type was never allowed. There is Mr Armstrong, an inspirational Black teacher and his White wife, who have had to face down ignorance and discrimination in their working and personal lives. There is the tragic and moving story of Marisa Peggot who endures unbearable mental and physical torture by her partner as a young mother and ends up in prison for wounding him with a knife but is eventually released and reunited with her son: both damaged individuals groping towards a better life. Demon is able to use his skill at drawing cartoons to create a hillbilly superhero character in a local newspaper to counter the negative stereotypes of rural people as feckless, inbred wasters and to illustrate the real challenges that they face.
The book ends with Demon aged 18, and finally free of drugs, finding a tentative new love and making his third attempt to head east and see the ocean for the first time in his life.
I would strongly recommend this book as a brilliant and illuminating read.
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