This modern American take on Dickens’ David Copperfield is set in an impoverished part of the Appalachians, where closure of the coal mines has destroyed the local economy, and too many people, particular the young, fall prey to drug pushers and “Big Pharma” schemes to encourage consumption of their opioid painkillers like Oxycontin which led to widespread substance abuse and addiction.

The narrator is Damon aka Demon Copperhead, born on a trailer floor to a drug-addicted teenage single mother, shortly after his young father’s death by drowning. This is the cue for the author, who has switched her focus from the environment to social injustice, to expose the failings of the foster care system, the ravages caused by the underregulated use of drugs like “Oxy”, and the unfair labelling, even mockery, of the rural poor who in fact may benefit from a stronger sense of community and closeness to the natural world than their urban counterparts. Perhaps Barbara Kingsolver’s love of nature, which prompts some of her best prose, has made her express this view through Demon, who comes to believe that the “rural poor” do not deserve to be mocked as “hillbillies” since they can at least hunt or produce their own food without the need to “hustle” for cash, and are prepared to relate to strangers by looking them in the eye.

It may be beneficial to have read David Copperfield recently enough to be able to match the modern characters to the original ones, but this is not essential. The author’s ability to enter the mindset and sustain the speech pattern of a bright, talented, resilient but sadly deprived, ill-educated and often mistreated young man is an achievement, assisted by her personal knowledge of the language that years spent later outside Appalachia “tried to shame” from her tongue. On the other hand, the corny, wisecracking style often grates.

This novel is hard going for a non-American reader by reason of the copious slang, unfamiliar cultural references and acronyms – a few footnotes would have been useful. Heaven knows how it will stand translation into other languages. Dickens had to write his novels in instalments for magazines, presumably leaving readers panting for more, but I found it mentally exhausting to read Demon Copperhead for more than a few chapters at a time. This was partly owing to the style, but also to the relentless piling on of depressing, often unduly sordid events, leavened only occasionally by the odd dollop of sentimentality, or rare stroke of good fortune which one knows cannot last.

However, it is the sheer length of this book which is the problem. At nearly 550 pages in paperback, it would have benefited from the stripping out of a good deal of repetition and “filler” – something that it was much harder for Dickens to do, obliged to publish early chapters before he had finished the whole story. So perhaps the author has gone too far in imitating Dickens, by reproducing some of his flaws, also including a tendency to produce stereotypes or somewhat exaggerated, unconvincing characters

Yet Barbara Kingsolver has created a sympathetic person in Demon, raised awareness of some important social issues, and been quite ingenious at times in her reworking of Dickens’ original plot and cast of characters.