SOURCE: “Shadows of ‘Darkness,’” in Chicago Tribune Books, October 11, 1998, p. 6.

In the following review, Ewert offers tempered assessment of The Poisonwood Bible, citing weaknesses in Kingsolver's “heavy-handed” interpretation of events.

In 1890 Joseph Conrad traveled to the Congo in the employ of a Belgian trading company, under contract as a steamboat pilot. He made only one trip upriver before returning to England, desperately ill with dysentery and sick also of what he'd seen in the Congo. What he'd seen—gross cruelty inflicted by European colonists on the Congolese—became the subject of his novel Heart of Darkness. But Conrad's own conflicted position on race makes his novel notoriously resistant to interpretation. Do its most famous words, “The horror, the horror,” refer to the hypocrisy of the Belgians who preached Christian enlightenment while profiting from the enforced slavery of millions, or to “unspeakable rites” Conrad thought were practiced by the...