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Barbara Kingsolver's The Poisonwood Bible is remarkable not just for its story but also for its narrative form. It has five narrators. Orleanna Price and her four daughters accompany her husband Nathan Price, a Baptist missionary, to the Congo in 1959. The Price daughters and their mother narrate in contrapuntal alternation. By turns they describe their lives in a remote Congolese village and the fortunes of Nathan's mission to convert the Congolese.

Nathan himself never speaks to us, though his sermonising voice echoes through the novel. He is excluded because he resists all sympathy – he refuses to admit to doubt or weakness. "Our father speaks for all of us," observes Adah, and so the voices of his family are a kind of descant to his mission.

Telling a story in a sequence of monologues by different characters is a surprisingly old novelistic technique. It was pioneered in the 19th century by Wilkie Collins in The Moonstone, a crime mystery in which different characters spoke in turn as if giving evidence in a trial.

In the early 20th century it was associated with some of the pioneers of modernism – Virginia Woolf in The Waves or William Faulkner in As I Lay Dying. The Poisonwood Bible carries memories of Faulkner: the family comes originally from Mississippi, like Faulkner's, and their locutions have a Southern twang ("I was sore at father all right … But it was plain to see he was put out, too, something fierce").

Kingsolver does not, however, attempt so closely to follow the patterns of everyday speech. The voices of her characters are as much written as spoken. The convention has evolved to allow us to imagine narrative voices as expressions of different characters' thoughts.

Orleanna is given the benefit of hindsight. Back in Georgia after the years in Africa, she recalls events; her daughters' voices, however, seem to be describing experiences as they unfold. Three of the four sisters are teenagers when they arrive in Africa and Kingsolver has described how she read reams of magazines from the late 1950s and 60s in order to fabricate the idiom for American girls of the period.

Rachel is the eldest, and the most obstinately American, "heavy hearted in my soul for the flush commodes" she has left behind. Entirely resentful of the new world into which she is plunged, her truculence is expressed via a high school demotic. "I always wanted to be the belle of the ball, but, jeepers, is this ever the wrong ball".

Yet her scorn for her father's grim idealism allows for a mocking perceptiveness. "We are supposed to be calling the shots here, but it doesn't look to me like we're in charge of a thing". She speaks with a prissiness that produces frequent malapropisms, as when, in order to fend off the amorous local chief, she entertains the advances of a roguish South African pilot. "I'm willing to be a philanderist for peace, but a lady can only go so far where perspiration odor is concerned."

In contrast, her sister Leah, the dutiful daughter, seeks to follow her father. "All my life I've tried to set my shoes squarely into his footprints." Her narration combines biblical cadence with ready clichés. Her twin Adah suffers from hemiplegia and, for much of the novel, cannot speak at all. Yet she speaks to us. Indeed, speechless Adah is the novel's language expert. She plays with words and is a lover of palindromes, with which her chapters are punctuated.

She puns and rhymes and turns words inside out. She begins to learn the local tongue, Kikongo, and to discern that small differences of emphasis make one word become another. Hectoring the locals in his sermons, her father – she hears – keeps telling them something different from what he means. "Tata Jesus is a bangala!" he declares, meaning "something precious and dear". "But the way he pronounces it, it means the poisonwood tree."

Five-year-old Ruth May has her chapters, too, and as strong an inclination as any other character to cite the scriptures. Battered with chapter and verse by their father, every member of the Price family is steeped in the King James Bible. It provides the family likeness in their voices. Its verses are inescapable.

Orleanna thinks of her husband's power over her and hears Genesis in her head: in sorrow thou shalt bring forth children; and thy desire shall be to thy husband, and he shall rule over thee. "Oh, mercy. If it catches you in the wrong frame of mind, the King James Bible can make you want to drink poison in no uncertain terms."

The clear purpose of the multivocal narrative is to let you piece together the apparently strange world of the Congo from these different accounts. Until Leah befriends Anatole, the young man who translates her father's sermons as he is performing them, we only glimpse the Congolese, we never exactly hear them. Yet the more the Prices speak, the odder they seem, and the more intelligible and reasonable seem the habits of the supposedly benighted people they have come to instruct.

Barbara Kingsolver will be speaking to John Mullan at Kings Place on 29 May.

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