Blog Nº 50
“A kid is a terrible thing to be, in charge of nothing.”
Demon Copperhead
I had high hopes for Demon Copperhead based on how much I enjoyed Kingsolver’s The Poisonwood Bible, and it did not disappoint. The novel is a re-telling of Dickens’ quasi-autobiographical Bildungsroman David Copperfield; it’s a brave thing for Kingsolver to transpose such a popular, quintessentially English novel to her home turf of Appalachia in the States but she does it extremely well in this powerful, considered novel.
The novel’s hero Damon Fields, known as Demon and nicknamed Copperhead for his ginger hair, is born to a drug-using teenage single mother in a trailer in Lee County, Virginia. Even in such a deprived neighbourhood, Demon and his mother are particularly destitute. The kind-hearted Peggot family act as Demon’s secondary caregivers as his mother is in and out of rehab or shacking up with merciless boyfriends, but there is only so much outsiders can do for a child in such circumstances. Those familiar with the plot of David Copperfield may guess what happens next, but we follow Demon to young adulthood through the apathy and incompetence of the foster care system, the good and bad influences of friends he makes along the way, the struggle against the opioid crisis sweeping America and his ultimate battle to transcend the failure of those around him.
As a reader, you can’t help but feel shocked at what Demon and swathes of children like him must deal with from such a young age. He is born into a dead-end situation which reeks of the failed American Dream – for Demon, simply surviving against the odds is success when you’re born into a life without choices. The themes of idealism and social justice chime with Dickens’ own impassioned social criticism, and while what we deem as immoral has shifted greatly since the mid-nineteenth century, the earnest critique of institutional poverty and its detrimental impact on children is as relevant as ever. For me, Demon Copperhead also bears striking similarities to Donna Tartt’s The Goldfinch, where a young boy also falls victim to the failings of modern America – drugs, poverty, apathy – after the loss of a parent, and must struggle on to adulthood alone.
Kingsolver has created a masterful retelling of a classic novel which is both faithful to the source material and tells its own story, making the reader question whether anything has really changed for the better in the past 150 years for those less fortunate.
Happy reading,
Imo x
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