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The Color Purple's opening - a stepfather's warning to a fourteen-year-old girl never to tell anyone but God what he has done to her - sets the register for everything that follows. What could have been relentless misery becomes, in Alice Walker's hands, something stranger and more remarkable: a story of terrible damage that arrives as a hymn to the joy of being alive.

The epistolary form is the first thing to admire and the first thing readers tend to stumble over. Celie writes in the African American vernacular of the rural Georgia of her girlhood, a voice so phonetically immediate that her letters almost have to be heard rather than read. Some will find the early pages a wall to climb. The reward for climbing is considerable. Walker achieves something very rare for this form, building a full interior life without preciousness or literary posturing, and the evolution of Celie's language across forty years becomes the novel's most quietly brilliant device. You do not simply watch her grow into authority and self-knowledge; you feel the grammar tighten, the rhythm settle, the observations sharpen. The book teaches you how to read it as it goes.

The secondary cast is the other enormous pleasure here. Shug Avery, the blues singer who becomes Celie's lover and liberator, is one of the great vivid creations in twentieth-century American fiction, and Sofia, whose refusal to submit gets her nearly destroyed by the white power structure, is almost her equal. Harpo, Squeak, Nettie writing her parallel letters from a missionary posting in West Africa - the novel keeps opening out, and the African sections in particular broaden what could have been a claustrophobic domestic tragedy into something considerably larger about colonialism, patriarchy, and the shared fate of women across continents.

The book is not flawless. The men, with a few exceptions, come close to caricature, and the famous late-stage redemption of Mister can feel earned more by the novel's moral logic than by anything the character has actually done. Nettie's African letters, while thematically vital, sometimes read more like an anthropology primer than the voice of a sister writing home. A strain of second-wave feminist tidiness occasionally smooths over relationships that might have been more interesting left rougher. These are real reservations, and it is honest to name them.

None of them sink the book. What survives is the astonishing transformation at the novel's centre, Celie moving from silent object to self-possessed woman who runs her own business and her own life, and the theological argument woven through it - that God is not the old white man of Sunday sermons but the colour purple in a field, the simple fact of being noticed, the insistence that beauty matters even here. Forty years on, The Color Purple still carries the charge that made it controversial, Pulitzer-winning, and endlessly reread. It is not a perfect novel. It is a necessary one, and its best pages remain as good as anything American fiction has produced.