The Demon Copperhead

The Guardian book review:
 
"This powerful reimagining of David Copperfield follows one boy's struggle to survive amid America's opioid crisis."

"It’s a brave writer who takes on a retelling of Dickens, and of David Copperfield, the most personal of his novels, at that. And yet the American author Barbara Kingsolver’s Demon Copperhead – which transposes this very English, quasi-autobiographical Bildungsroman to her own home territory of Appalachia – feels in many ways like the book she was born to write.

The idealism and concern with social justice that are characteristic of Kingsolver’s worldview find their natural counterpart in Dickens’s impassioned social criticism. While the task of modernising his novel is complicated by the fact that mores have shifted so radically since the mid-19th century – 'immorality', AKA extramarital sex? Who cares? – the ferocious critique of institutional poverty and its damaging effects on children is as pertinent as ever.

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Kingsolver’s hero Damon Fields, known as Demon and nicknamed Copperhead for his red hair, is born to a drug-using teenage single mother in a trailer in Lee County, Virginia. Even in this deprived neighbourhood they stand out by being almost destitute, living between a coal camp 'and a settlement people call Right Poor'. Since his mother is in and out of rehab, Demon is partly raised by the sprawling, warm-hearted Peggot clan. It’s all there in Dickens: the weak, infantile mother, ripe for abuse; the dead father and the disciplinarian boyfriend turned merciless stepfather; the bad odds against which no child stands a chance – and also the outsiders, some loving and others less so, who offer only a limited form of help.

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Dickens would have agreed wholeheartedly with Demon’s verdict that 'a kid is a terrible thing to be, in charge of nothing'. If you’re familiar with David Copperfield, then the arc of Demon Copperhead will hold few surprises. Demon becomes a casualty of the 'monster-truck mud rally of child services': case workers who don’t read his file; foster parents who are only in it for the security cheque. Where David is packed off to gloomy Salem House, run by the sadistic Mr Creakle, Demon is quite literally farmed out to 'this big old gray-looking house, like Amityville', owned by a tobacco farmer called Crickson. While there he befriends two other boys, an unadulteratedly Dickensian Tommy Waddles – complete with his prototype’s habit of sketching skeletons – and the charismatic, pill-popping school quarterback Sterling Ford, known as Fast Forward for his prowess on the field. With his 'pharm parties' and status as football aristocracy, Sterling is a seductive recasting of the poisonous 'gentleman' by birth, James Steerforth."

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