Flight Behavior

The Butterflies That Should Not Be There

Dellarobia Turnbow is twenty-eight, married to a sheep farmer, trapped in a rural Tennessee life she did not quite choose and has mostly stopped fighting. On her way to begin an affair, she walks into a forest and finds it full of monarch butterflies — millions of them, where monarchs have never been seen, because climate disruption has pushed their migration off course and they have landed in the mountains of southern Appalachia rather than their Mexican wintering grounds.

The butterflies become a local miracle, then a media event, then the subject of a scientific research team led by Ovid Byron, who comes to understand exactly how wrong the situation is. For Dellarobia, they are a catalyst — a crack in the ordinary world through which something different might enter.

Climate Change as Literary Subject

Kingsolver is one of the few literary novelists to engage directly with climate science as subject matter rather than background, and Flight Behavior is her fullest engagement. What she captures that most climate writing misses is the experiential quality of climate disruption: not fire and flood, but wrongness. Things that happen in the wrong place, at the wrong time, in the wrong abundance or absence — the butterflies are wrong in the way that a January thunderstorm is wrong, or April snow, or the specific absence of a species that used to be everywhere.

What Distinguishes This Book

Among the qualities that set Flight Behavior apart: The climate science is accurate and the dramatisation of it is more effective than any polemic; Dellarobia is one of Kingsolver’s most fully realised female protagonists; and The monarch butterfly biology is rendered with genuine wonder. These strengths are evident from the first pages and sustain across the whole work.

Themes

The thematic concerns of Flight Behavior give it weight beyond its surface narrative. Climate change is not experienced as catastrophe but as wrongness — things happening in the wrong place at the wrong time. Scientific understanding and emotional response are different things — you can understand climate change and still find it incomprehensible. A life that feels stalled may transform when the world around it transforms. These ideas emerge from the texture of the work rather than explicit statement, which is the mark of ambitious fiction done well.

The Writing

Barbara Kingsolver’s prose in Flight Behavior is the vehicle through which the book’s ideas travel. The style is calibrated to the subject — neither more ornate nor more stripped-down than the material requires. This kind of precision is less common than it appears, and it is one of the reasons the book repays re-reading: there is more in each page than a single pass recovers.

Limitations

The scientist character Ovid Byron occasionally functions more as an explainer than a person. The ending resolves less than the setup promises. These are worth knowing before starting, though they are unlikely to diminish the experience for the readers the book is written for.

Who This Is For

Readers of Kingsolver who want her most politically urgent novel, and literary fiction readers interested in how climate change is lived rather than theorised.

Our rating: 4.0/5 — The best literary novel about what climate change actually feels like from the inside of a rural American life.

Kingsolver’s Climate Novel

Flight Behavior was published in 2012, and it is Kingsolver’s most direct engagement with climate change as a subject for fiction. The premise is grounded in real ecological disruption: millions of monarch butterflies, blown off their established migration route, settle in the wrong place — a Tennessee sheep farmer’s wooded hillside rather than their Mexican wintering grounds. For Dellarobia Turnbow, a young woman whose life has stalled, the butterflies are at first a private vision and then, as scientists and journalists arrive, a public phenomenon that pulls her into a world she had no expectation of joining.

What Kingsolver captures more precisely than most writers on the subject is the texture of how climate disruption is actually experienced by people who are not scientists and not activists. It does not announce itself as catastrophe. It announces itself as wrongness — a beautiful, disorienting wrongness, in this case, that is no less alarming for being lovely.

Knowledge and Feeling

One of the novel’s most intelligent moves is to separate scientific understanding from emotional response. Dellarobia comes to understand, through the biologist Ovid Byron, exactly why the butterflies are where they are and what it means, and the understanding does not make the situation any less incomprehensible to her on the level of feeling. This gap — between knowing and being able to absorb what one knows — is the real subject of Flight Behavior, and it is what gives the novel its lasting relevance. Kingsolver also resists the temptation to make her rural Tennessee characters into either heroes or fools; the divisions over climate that run through the community are rendered with sympathy on more than one side.

For readers who want Kingsolver at her most politically urgent, Flight Behavior is the novel that most fully fuses her training as a biologist with her instincts as a storyteller. It is a book about a stalled life transformed by a transformed world, and it argues, without ever lecturing, that the two transformations are not separable.

Reading Guides

• The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver — Full Review
• Prodigal Summer by Barbara Kingsolver — Full Review