I just finished Fieldwork, by Mischa Berlinski, who will be at the Festival of Faith and Writing this spring. As the LA Times reviewer said, it's a "entertaining and surprisingly readable novel of ideas." Occasionally it plods in backstory; which makes a lot more sense when you consider he started out writing a work of nonfiction. It was going to be about the work of Christian missionaries in the mountains of Thailand, and ended up being about a particular anthropologist and a fictional people called the Dyalo.
This would be an interesting read alongside The Poisonwood Bible, because Berlinski's missionaries are believable and sympathetic characters. His narrator doesn't need to shake a finger at them for cultural insensitivity, and he never lets us believe that we understand the Dyalo any better than the missionaries do. For all the "telling" that happens in this novel, Berlinski "shows" when it most matters, and allows us to draw our own conclusions about culture, faith, and the mysteries of the spirit.
