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Book Reviews
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Parable of the Sower
by Octavia Butler
(Four Walls Eight Windows; 1993)
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How bad can it get? In “Parable of the Sower,” a novel set in the California of 2025, Octavia Butler tells us. Global climate change shrinks the water supply to a trickle. Privatized resources and public services produce hunger, thirst, and lawlessness. Drug-crazed hordes roam the countryside, compelled to loot, rape, and burn, and the starving poor scavenge or steal. Once-middle-class gated communities huddle in fear and want behind their walls, waiting for their fortresses to crumble under constant assault from without.
In one such fortress, 15-year-old Lauren Olamina lives with her preacher father, her stepmother and stepbrothers. The eldest child of the community leader, she is loaded with responsibility and a strange disability: she has hyperempathy, meaning she feels the pain of others as though it were her own.
And she has one other unusual burden, the obsessive need to begin her own religion. She is the new prophet of a god of change that promises neither personal caring nor an afterlife, but has one great virtue, it can be shaped by human foresight and will.
When Lauren’s doomed community finally succumbs in 2027, she goes on the road to the north where she has the possibility of a future. Along the way she accumulates companions and adherents, a kind of Dorothy without her Toto. She traverses areas familiar as your backyard, the 118, 23, 101 and 5 freeways, while she encounters violent predators, constant danger and hard times. Somewhere in Humboldt County, she finds a place to settle with her friends.
Butler’s detailed, plausible descriptions of everyday threats and deprivations in an increasingly impossible environment create a sense of deep reality and enormous suspense, keeping the reader turning pages. The interpersonal conflicts among family members before the fall seem real and moving.
The journey after the fall is somewhat less involving. Partly this is a matter of structure; a journey is by its nature episodic. Moreover, some exhaustion sets in. The main character/ narrator is tired of her reality and so perhaps is the author, and eventually so is the reader. A great many characters are introduced and are not fully realized as individuals. The teenaged narrator is really not believable as a teenager, although as an individual she is real and well developed. To the positive, some descriptions such as the vehicle-bereft freeway streaming with refugees are vivid enough to linger long in memory.
In all, this is a gripping and gritty look at a possible future for us all, stronger in ideas and believable detail than characterization or beauty of language.
Margaret Morris
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