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For those who asked, here is my review of _Parable_. I know now that I
misread the text with regard to the hyperempathy question, so *please* don't
point it out to me. Any other feedback, though, would be welcome.
Nicola
Nicola Griffith
http://www.america.net/~daves/ng/
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A gospel or a parable does not have to follow the same rules as a novel
in order to be successful. The point of the parable is the moral, not the
tale itself. Read as a parable, Butler's latest book is powerful,
thought-provoking, and possessed of a definite agenda--keep adapting or
die. As a novel, however, it is curiously contradictory.
It is 2024. Lauren Oya Olamina is about to turn fifteen. As is
usual with the protagonists of science fiction Lauren is precocious,
without her biological mother, and different from everyone else. Her real
mother took a designer drug called paracetco which damaged Lauren, leaving
with the trait of "hyperempathy." (More on which later--which is pretty
much what Butler does: introduce the idea, then drop it like a hot potato
until a lot later in the book.) Hyperempathy is not the only thing that
makes her different. She is a self-conscious prophet, the originator of a
belief system she names Earthseed, a credo based on the ability to adapt
to change:
All that you touch
You Change.
All that you Change
Changes you.
The only lasting truth
Is Change.
God
Is Change.
The world *is* changing. California is running out of water; unemployment
is producing terrible poverty; the largely illiterate and homeless
population is turning to crime and drugs, while those still fortunate
enough to have jobs are barricading off their communities. When they have
to leave home to go work, they travel at dawn, when the desperate and the
drug-crazed are still asleep, and they carry guns they are not afraid to
use.
While much of this is extrapolated beautifully from the present
day--the squeezing of the middle class: teachers, preachers and academics
losing out to drug-using criminals and anarchists, corrupt and ineffective
emergency services, and the corporate rich--there are some puzzling gaps.
For example, poverty has reduced the community to two computers, three
televisions and one "window," but everyone has radios and phones: Butler
sidesteps the probability that thirty years from now, a radio will *be* a
television will *be* a phone will *be* an interactive multimedia audio
visual system. There is a Noah's Ark feel to things--everyone either
pairs up (hetero)sexually, or dies--and a curious 1950s attitude to gender
roles and expectations. Lauren's bad boy younger brother, Keith, has
definite and contemptuous views of women, though we never find out where
these views might come from in a society where the parents are both
equally well-educated, the eldest sister is smart as a whip, and there is
no television to pump received ideas of women's frailties into the
impressionable adolescent's mind.
But all this is, ultimately, beside the point because the point of PARABLE
OF THE SOWER is Lauren's growth and maturation as a prophet, the
formulation and codification of her beliefs into _Earthseed: The Book of
Life_.
Although nominally divided into four parts, PARABLE can be more easily
seen as two sections: the first, which includes the first three parts of
the book, when Lauren aged fifteen to seventeen and still living with her
family, covers the private origination and development of Earthseed
principles; the second details her flight from the destroyed neighborhood,
her adaptation of a prophet persona, and the formation of the nucleus of
her Earthseed community.
Initially, the formulation of Lauren's ideas, and the ideas themselves,
make sense. Lauren, like many science fictional readers and protagonists,
knows that Things Are Gonna Change For The Worse. She sees the growing
unemployment, the increasing scarcity of water, the growing futility of
politicians and emergency services, and understands that total breakdown
is inevitable. The only way to survive is to accept the change, remain
adaptable, learn to live with a different world. We learn along with
Lauren that "Intelligence is ongoing, individual adaptability," and that
"Civilization is to groups what intelligence is to individuals." We do
not disagree. But it is when she makes a conceptual leap, "The Destiny of
Earthseed/Is to take roots among the stars," that we lose the thread. It
is at this point, we suspect, that what has once been to Lauren a method
of organizing her world actually becomes a religion. We are asked to take
it on faith.
Lauren, unlike the heroines of such adventures as EMERGENCE and FALSE
DAWN, is not alone in a hostile world where the Big Bang or the Horrid
Disease have already happened and the reconstruction can begin. She is
still in the middle of on-going change, and she is not free to do as she
wants/thinks best; there is her family to consider. Although she can see
clearly enough where it will lead, her family and friends are in denial;
ignore it and it will go away.
Again, the story of Noah's Ark springs to mind, but instead of a boat,
Lauren prepares a backpack. (The contents are lovingly described for all
of us who have dreamed and planned and longed for such an opportunity to
battle adversity and win.) But this is not a simplistic adventure novel
for juveniles and Butler does not take the easy path. What Lauren knows
conflicts with how she feels. She loves her family; she is only a
teenager. Torn, she prepares the backpack then does nothing but write
more Earthseed verses.
When Lauren is seventeen, Keith--aged fourteen--goes rogue: he leaves what
he perceives as the restrictive, sheeplike community and runs with the
wolves, those whose only rule appears to be survival of the fittest. He
survives quite well, for a while, paying furtive visits to the family home
when his father is absent. It is here and in other close examinations of
non-sexual relationships that Butler shows her extraordinary ability to
delineate subtleties, detailing Lauren's gradual realization that her
brother is a sociopath, a murderer--that she does not, in fact, like
him--while at the same time retaining the sense of love and family that
binds them. Perfectly done.
But then Keith meets some leaner and meaner wolves and is tortured and
killed. And Lauren's father goes missing--probably murdered out of hand
by the drug-eating, fire-setting gangs--and Lauren senses the imminence of
disaster. Still she does nothing: her family needs her.
When she is just eighteen, the community is finally overwhelmed: destroyed
by a gang of drug-eating pyromaniacs who rape, then kill, then plunder.
The only survivors are Lauren, a boy her age called Harry, and Zahra--the
youngest wife of the community's polygynist. It is here that the book
seems to lose its depth.
Butler constantly raises issues or ideas, then drops them. For example,
we are initially told that Lauren's hyperempathy--her ability or curse to
feel what she *thinks* others feel (her brother Keith once made her bleed
by squirting himself with red ink)--allows her to share both pleasure and
pain, and we get a ten page burst of Lauren feeling the pain of others,
but then we hear nothing about it until the second half of the book.
When Butler remembers about it, the effects of the hyperempathy are
peculiarly two dimensional. Lauren feels only the pain from others'
physical wounds and the pleasure from others' sexual activity. No details
about the vicarious enjoyment of food, the suffering of others' fear and
so on.
Lauren decides she must travel as a man. No details on the more ordinary
difficulties she might face as a result, and then when Harry inadvertently
reveals she's a woman, there doesn't seem to be any fallout. Much is made
of there not being anywhere safe to settle in the California area, and
then the fledgling community promptly settles in northern California.
The only time Butler reaches the kind of truth and clarity apparent in the
first half of the book is in certain beautifully drawn interactions
between people who have to learn about when to trust and when to suspend
that trust. But these incidents, no matter how illuminatingly observed,
are not enough to sustain one hundred and fifty pages of a novel. After
Lauren has formulated her religion and the Robledo neighborhood is
destroyed, the book reads almost as if Butler has lost interest.
But while the second half of the book has a tendency towards fairly
typical skiffy After The Disaster novels, in the first half of PARABLE
Butler takes some of the givens of science fiction--change, preparedness,
survival of the fittest--and produces daring, bold and intellectually
fascinating meta science fiction. With the devastatingly simple prose of
her teenage protagonist, she does something none of the New Testament
gospels (or any other religious text I can think of, offhand) dares: she
details not only the beliefs of a prophet but the birth of those beliefs.
She attempts to meld reason and religion. She almost succeeds.
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