‘Demon Copperhead’ by Barbara Kingsolver

Before I read this book I already knew that Barbara Kingsolver wrote it as a homage and 21st century take on Charles Dickens’ David Copperfield. Kingsolver’s book at 548 pages is certainly seen as a ‘big baggy monster’ by today’s standards, but because I am a complete glutton for punishment I read the original David Copperfield as well, and you can see my review here.

I’m so pleased that I read the original before I read Demon Copperfield because, even though Kingsolver’s book stands on its own two feet perfectly well, I enjoyed seeing parallels between the two books, and how she gave the events of the original book a 21st century twist. Quite amazingly, I think, these allusions to the original (which would only be obviously to readers who had read it) did not propel the modern book into farce or melodrama, which a homage to a 19th century, somewhat dated, book could easily do. Instead, they made perfect sense within a modern context.

In Dickens’ time, child labour blighted the childhoods of children. In the 21st century, drug addiction blights the children of users, who often end up using themselves. Vicious and avaricious stepfathers and childbirth deaths could orphan a child in the past: now it is overdoses, particularly of prescription drugs like Oxycontin which spring from, and in turn, corrupt the medical/pharmaceutical/crime network that have made them the scourge they are in America. (Thank God and successive Australian Governments for the Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme and drug detection schemes that have prevented the same thing happening in Australia). The original David Copperfield was left to the mercy of unscrupulous employers: Demon Copperhead was the plaything of a welfare bureaucracy that worked more to the interests of unscrupulous ‘care’-givers playing the system for profit. Sport and his ability to draw became Demon’s means of escape.

The Wikipedia page for Demon Copperhead shows the pairing of original characters with Kingsolver’s characters. The names have resonances, but the judgements you make of them as a reader do differ. Dori (Dickens’ Dora) is addicted to Oxycontin, and although she is passive and in thrall to her addiction, she is not the airhead that Dora was. Mr Micawber in Dickens’ book was a larger-than-life, loveable perennial optimist: Mr and Mrs McCobb are grifters and schemers, just as reprehensible as Mr Creakle who fosters boys as a cheap labour source and in order to get their welfare payments. U-Haul does not have the same sinuous oiliness of Dickens’ original Uriah Heep, who made so much of his purported ‘umbleness – there is no 21st century equivalent of ‘humility’ as a virtue- and he seems to play a less important role in Kingsolver’s plot. Dickens is coy about Steerforth’s corruption of Emily: Kingsolver is upfront about the prostitution and sex trafficking into which Sterling Ford drags Emmy, Demon’s childhood friend.

In Dickens’ books, London and the large Victorian cities provide a backdrop to the plot. Kingsolver, who is from Appalachia herself, sets her book in the southern Appalachian mountains of Virginia. She knows these places (as did indeed Dickens know London and England), and both writers use their books as a critique of their own society. I did find myself thinking of Shuggie Bain or J.D. Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy, and there has been some critique of Demon Copperhead as being ‘poverty porn’. I didn’t see it that way. I was driven to finish the book, fearful that Kingsolver would do something very smart-alecky and postmodern to the ending. Did she? You’ll have to read it to find out.

This book garnered many prizes including the Pulitzer and the Women’s Prize for fiction. It well deserved them. It was a brilliant re-telling of David Copperfield, with many winks and nudges for those familiar with the original, and a perfectly independent story on its own terms.

My rating: 10/10

Read because: Ivanhoe Reading Circle March selection.