Nancy Lindisfarne writes: It feels presumptuous to write about Barbara Kingsolver’s Demon Copperhead. It is a magnificent book, and as we shall see, speaks eloquently for itself.

Kingsolver writes of Appalachia and the heart-breaking truths of people many other Americans despise as red necks, hillbillies, as people so stupid they’ve been suckered in by Trump. And she goes to war on their behalf – against big pharma and their hired killer reps, against schools where bullying is the norm, against a childcare system in which foster kids can be enslaved and against a system where racism is everywhere the bottom line.

Dicken’s David Copperfield shocked, then wrung the hearts of the caring Victorians and exposed the venal and vicious class power of those other Victorians, the school masters, the factory owners, the people with money, the people who used and abused the poor.

Mockery, truth-telling and empathy were Dickens’ weapons, and they are the ones Kingsolver wields to do battle. She gives no quarter to the rich and powerful, but neither does she forgive the smug liberals and the progressive lefties for believing the suffering of Hilary Clinton’s ‘deplorables’ is self-inflicted and deserved.

The sweep of the book is enormous. The whole system is its setting.

Since Reagan and his neoliberal economics in the 1980s, the United States has become a grossly unequal country. The class divisions between the obscenely wealthy 1% and the modestly wealthy millionaires are vast. The division between the people with millions and most of the rest of us is cavernous, and across a chasm which is far wider and deeper still are millions of poor Americans, white and Black.

This is an America where 9% of men can expect to spend a year or more in prison, and where 49% of Black men and 38% of white men have been arrested by the age of 23. It is the country with by far the highest rate of imprisonment of all the G20 nations – no one else is close.

The institutional violence and pain hidden behind the numbers is very great. But if you believe that the people ruined by poverty are trash, white trash, or worth-less because black, then apparently these numbers are just fine.

Kingsolver’s war is fought with anger and insight in equal parts. Demon Copperhead is our protagonist and eponymous hero. He is an incarnation of David Copperfield, whose story was that of Charles Dickens himself. He is a misused, abused, orphaned child, who slowly and painfully finds his way to love and writing.

And all the characters we met in 10^th Grade English – thank you Mrs Lanagan – are there. It is a hapless cast. David/Demon’s father a Melungeon, with dark skin, light green eyes and red hair. He was young and loved when he dies a tragic death. ‘A beautiful man with too much heart for the raw deal he got’. Demon is his posthumous son, one the survivors to whom Kingsolver dedicates her book.

Demon is wildly handsome, stubborn, smart and funny. He sees the shades of green in the hills, he knows the taste of a sassafras, he listens to the birds sing, and he can tell us about a dogwood winter. Demon Copperhead is the best working-class hero in American literature since Huck Finn.

Kingsolver the storyteller, like Dickens, understands that ‘keeping secrets from young ears only plants a seed between them’. And that ‘a good story doesn’t just copy life, it pushes back on it’.

Demon’s birth is exceptional, he’s born with a caul, which will protect him from drowning. But nothing can save his mother. She too was a damaged child and early on she ODs on Oxy, leaving Demon alone to face the ‘far end of lonely’.   

The cast of characters includes the kindly Peggots, who have rescued many waifs and strays, but are now too old to take on another. There is the vicious stepfather, Murdstone/Stone wearing just his wifebeater shirt. And what Demon learns from Stone is that ‘if you lie with snakes, you get up with the urge to bite back’.

And, of course, there are the feckless Micawbers/McCabbs. Betsy Trotwood turns up as Demon’s demanding granny. And there is evil once personified in Steerforth, the charismatic cad. Here he is the shiny football star, Fast Forward, a Svengali sociopath who charms and then ruins people because he has been so very hurt himself. And perhaps most memorable of all is U-Haul, the hideous, sycophantic creep, Uriah Heep.

But both Dickens and Kingsolver also leave space for hope, and there are others like gold: Tommy, Demon’s steadfast friend and the loves of Demon’s life – the fallen Emmy, Dori, who dies, and the admirable Angus, the zero-bullshit girl who invites Demon to trust ‘the wild ride – meaning life or whatever’ .

This is a very big book, in every sense. It is about drugs – Oxy –  ‘God’s gift for the laid-off deep-hole man with his back and neck bones grinding like bags of gravel’.

And about schools – where the teachers ask for drugs for ADHD to ‘take the kids down a notch’. And where ‘Uppers, downers, half the kids in school line up for their pills’.

In middle school, ‘life gets mean, and a girl starts to see how mad is better than sorry and telling is better than asking’.

And high school, where all passion and energy reside in football, in ‘the smell of mauled sod and sweat and pent-up lust and popcorn. The Friday-night lights.’ And where the coach is worshiped for wins wrought with punishing brutality. ‘Take the football out of high school, it’s church without Jesus – who would even go?’

And from beginning to end, there is the history – this is an old-guy topic.

The stories are told by men who don’t want a handout, ‘who grew up hard working men and that’s what they believe in. Working. Even if they are on disability now, goddammit to hell, they hate those other people’. And they talk about the Union – and they say that word ‘like it was a handshake deal between them and God’.

This history goes very deep. ‘Before the redneck miner wars, the coal landgrabs, the timber landgrabs. the Whiskey Rebellion was an actual war. George Washington marched the US Army on our people for refusing to pay tax on corn liquor which they weren’t even selling for money, mainly just making for neighbourly entertainment. How do you get tax money out of moonshine? Answer: you and what army. It goes a ways to explaining people’s feelings about taxes and guns’.

‘And there are Cherokees that got kicked off their land. All the other tribes, same. Black people after they were freed up, wanting their own farms but getting no end of grief for it, till they gave up and went to the city’.

And what the coal companies did, ‘was put the shuthole on any choice other than going into the mines’. They bought up communities whole, ‘land, hospitals, courthouses, schools, company owned. Nobody needed to get all that educated for being a miner, so they let the schools go to rot. And they made sure no mills or factories got in the door’.

And they get us ‘thinking this mess was our fault’. But no, ‘they did this to you’.

‘We’re the dog of America. Every make of person now has their proper nouns, except, for some reason, us. Hicks, red necks, not capitalized … it is a hillbilly-hater marathon’.

‘These people and vegetarians and so forth that are all about being fair to the races and the gays. I’m down with that. I agree. But would it cross any mind to be fair to us? No, it would not. How do I know? TV. The comedy channel is so funny it can make you want to unlock the gun cabinet and kill yourself. Do they really think that along with being brainless and having sex with animals, we don’t even have cable?’

‘This is what I would say, if I could, to all the smart people of the world with their dumb hillbilly jokes, we are right here in the stall. We can actually hear you.’