After loving Parable of the Sower (see my review) I was frustrated by this one. No the 1st wasn't flawless, but for 2/3 of its length it was nearly so. This one, on the other hand, is more defective than perfect, and despite a brilliantly realized, realistic dystopia -- an all-too-rare feat that I would otherwise be slobbering over -- my overarching feeling after finishing Talents was disappointment.Butler still did certain things very well here. The necessary shift that Olamina undergoes in her outreach effort feels natural and believable. There are the same horror elements that were so impactful the first go-round, this time chiefly taking place in a post-modern concentration camp. There's a shockingly blatant critique of Christian fundamentalism that was as welcome as it was unexpected. There is still an emotional connection with most of the characters from the first book.Unfortunately those are about all the positives I can point to. The pacing of the book is way off, hindered even further by the detached narration device. I really missed hearing it solely from Lauren's perspective and found myself skimming most of her daughter's interpolations (until the very end at least). Having Lauren interrupted by her daughter and occasionally Bankole and one other character not only threw off the rhythm but also called more attention to a narrative flaw that was relatively hidden in the first: namely, there's no way that Lauren could journal as exactly as she did, complete with verbatim dialogue plus precise body language and movements. It's not a big deal but it made the proceedings more difficult to engage with.As for the pace, the first half of the book was almost entirely setting (or "exposition" for you fans of the plot pyramid). Nothing happened that couldn't have been condensed to a prologue, or maybe even an epilogue to the first one. Nothing happened until Jarrett's Crusaders came to town. Seriously. Nothing I cared about anyway, because the new characters, and even some of the old ones, were too thin to matter and/or didn't behave believably. (And yes, I am including the spoiler that occurred during the 1st half.) The pace did step up after that, when stuff actually happened, and it proceeded pretty well until the end when the whole thing jumped the rails entirely after Ch. 21. This would be a good spot to convey some of my concerns about internal consistency, concerns that nagged through much of the book but became dealbreakers in the abovementioned chapter. First of all and most minorly, we heard throughout Sowers that the border between CA and OR was closed and heavily guarded, yet in this one it's not. What happened there? A little more serious is what we find out when Lauren stays with the Elfords in a "middle-class neighborhood even though they could afford their own walled enclave." So they live without walls, just in a normal neighborhood? These places still exist? Or are we meant to understand that they are in fact protected here too, a la Robledo? If not, is it just CA that is so messed up then, and it hasn't spread anywhere else? I mean, CA was really messed up, with like people eating each other and shit, and sex slaves and non-sex slaves, but maybe that's just localized and contained down there? And in the rest of the country there are still universities and airplanes and you can just live as if nothing crazy and horrifically dystopian is going on? Basically, California is the only place that's fucked, is that the message? I mean I guess that's understandable, given the current state of CA, but it would help to spell it out a little more. And if so, then why the hell are people still in California? This just made no sense to me at all.And then the end, when the pace accelerates exponentially for characters and their goals (I won't say more to avoid spoilers), it was astonishingly rushed. It felt like Butler just wanted to be done with it already and crammed in everything, including stuff that could have even been another book. Or alternatively, it would have been better to condense the 1st half and spend more time here. As it was, to believe that all these things happened over a few weeks in Portland was ludicrous, especially when it appears that none of the followers Lauren had lived with for years felt nearly as strong about her message as these strangers she talked with over less than a month.My passionate criticism reveals how affected I was by the 1st book, and even by some of the characters in this one. Having the storytelling flubbed like this left a pretty bitter taste. Make no mistake -- the story is still a good one, even an important one, and the author's purpose is powerful. But it seems that Butler, much like her protagonist, struggled significantly with her purpose's execution. P.s. I still look forward to reading as much of Butler's stuff as I can, hopefully in the near future.Cross-posted at Not Bad Movie and Book Reviews.
This book is even harder to read than the first one was, but it's difficult to go into why without being a festival of spoilers. So I'll just say a few things -- I noticed some people complaining in their reviews of Parable of the Sower that while Butler did go into some of the ways that minorities are hit harder during difficult times, she didn't go into much into how they fall harder on women. (But wait a second, really? Not with the two sisters who are prostituted by their own father? Not with the return of patriarchal polygamy? Not with all the reasons that Lauren spends much of her time disguised as a man?) Anyway, whether you feel that was a legitimate critique or not, this book makes up for it in spades.Also, this book is pretty hard on Christianity. There are some truly, truly awful things done in this book by people who've wrapped themselves in the flag and the cross. Even those not participating in violent acts are portrayed as enabling those thugs, with what could at best be described as willful ignorance. There are a few individuals who call themselves Christian, yes, who are not evil. But those associated with the church in this book do not have much to redeem them. And then there is this one scene, where the thugs are quoting the bit about Eve's sins being the reason that women will bear pain in childbirth in order to justify themselves, and I had such a strong, gut-level reaction that I had to put the book away for a moment, and I thought, "I'm done. Me and Christianity are done. I can no longer use a label that in any way implies I lend my support to these men."Because the truly horrifying thing about this book is that it cannot be put away from you on the basis that it is "fiction." These things have happened, are happening, will continue to happen all over the world. The Holocaust. Aboriginal and Native re-education camps all over the world. Japanese internment camps. The worst of the re-education camps for homosexuals. These things are true. So it is not so easy to just look away.My only criticism of this book is that somewhere between the first main action of the book and it's conclusion, maybe about 2/3 or 3/4 of the way through -- things get a little wandering and hand-wavy. Which is disappointing, but forgivable. Overall this pair of books ranks very high on my favorite speculative fiction of all time.
Do You like book Parable Of The Talents (2001)?
I'm kind of torn about this one. I loved Parable of the Sower but this is a very different book with a very different focus. I'm not a fan of Christian Fundamentalism, but I think the texts criticism of what that movement is or what it could be was a bit much. Really? All the captors were Puritanical sadists and secret rapists and child molesters. Man, it was just too much to take at times. Which I thought it was unique to give us the next big dystopia as a theocracy, the way she made Fundamentalists the new Nazis was too heavy handed. Also, I thought major opportunities were missed in the use of multiple point of view narrative. While Larkin and Lauren were full developed, we were given no choice but to hate Marcus. His two brief chapters gave no insight into his character, and he remained two-dimensional. The only redeeming characteristic of the man was that he was beautiful, and how many times was that mentioned? Overall, I admire Octavia Butler's writing, and her unique take on the genre of Science Fiction, but I was greatly disappointed in this book, especially based on its much stronger predecessor.
—Andrew
This book is the sequel to Parable of the Sower, but it stands up pretty well by itself, though I would definitely recommend reading the first book, because Butler is that good and these books are very powerful. In Parable of the Talents, Lauren Olamina, the protagonist of the first book, continues trying to build a community and a following devoted to her new religion, "Earthseed." Unfortunately, she is trying to found this new religion just when America, in the grip of a near-apocalyptic economic and environmental collapse, elects a witch-burning fundie Talibaptist for President. Lauren and her people are literally enslaved, and Lauren's infant daughter is taken away from her.This is a dark book, a truly horrific dystopia, but the rape and violence does not read like a gratuitous admixture the way it does in so many books. You know how some authors want to make their books extra dark to let you know that these are Very Bad Times and Very Bad People, so they toss in a little rape, a little dismemberment, like one of those buckets o' blood horror films that just wind up being too schlocky and over-the-top to really horrify you? Octavia Butler doesn't do that. Instead, Lauren tells us what happened to her and her people in very clear but non-graphic terms, and the impact is felt for the rest of the story because even though she is trying to start a hopeful new religion, she hates her abusers with the heat of a thousand burning suns and makes no bones about it. It's very refreshing. None of that "I have to get past this" or forgiveness bullshit. She does survive and eventually launch her movement, successfully, but it's not like "Oh, and along the way some bad stuff happened."More horrific is the fact that Butler wrote this in 1998, and while the raving crush-the-poor blame-everything-on-brown-people sentiment was certainly alive then, Butler probably meant to exaggerate things a bit to make the country seem so horribly out of control. Today, while we're not exactly in the throes of Butler's "pox," the sentiments of President Steel could come right out of the mouths of some of the current crop of GOP candidates.Parable of the Talents is also, indirectly, a mother-daughter story. It's told in the past tense through the journals of both Lauren Olamina and her daughter, whom she never knew until her daughter reached adulthood. Her daughter has a very difficult time coming to terms with who her mother was, and so there are two very different narrative threads woven through the events described in the novel: Lauren, describing much of it as it was happening, and her daughter, commenting (and often, passing judgment) decades later.This is one of those science fiction books that really should be considered literature, and it's a shame Octavia Butler isn't more widely known. It's even more of a shame that she died before she could write the third book she planned. I give both of the Earthseed books a very high recommendation.
—David
I don't feel capable of adequately putting down my thoughts on this book quite yet. But I'll write some stuff. Parable of the Talents and Sower before it are both grand accomplishments in inspiring deep self reflective thought while also entertaining the reader with deep and relatable characters. For many years now I have been struggling with how I should determine my attitude toward religion and belief. Though my inquiry into understanding the true nature of faith and religion is far from over, Butler has been able to show me some insightful avenues of thought, but perhaps also stoked the fires of fear that lurk under my misunderstanding. If not for that fear, I would not feel any inclination to investigate at all. I am taken aback by it; what do I have to fear and thereby hate within the cathartic belief systems of others? Lack of understanding breeds fear, which leads to bitterness, hate and judgement. I like to understand people and processes, if anything that would be my purpose in life so far. Through understanding the belief system created by Butler throughout these novels, Earthseed, I have also gained insight into some of the characteristics of religion in general. The protagonist of the Sower novels, Lauren Olamina, is a character for whom I have great respect. She is a realist, Earthseed is largely based on the fundamental concept that the world is what we make of it and yet we are subject to it even then. Change happens but we are not powerless to shape that change. Through her condition as a "sharer", a brain disorder which causes her sympathetic reaction to manifest physically and uncontrollably, Olamina is a master of understanding the feelings of others. Through this understanding she is capable of bringing people together, converting them to her religion. However I still feel that she is blind in subtle ways. Her steadfast faith that her beliefs are unequivocal truths makes her vulnerable, while she created Earthseed largely to help people understand this post-apocalyptic world, survive in it and become stronger, a contradiction. She doesn't seem to understand why some people, such as her husband, brother and eventually daughter, just don't believe the way she does. Much in her character reminds me of Orson Scott Card's Ender Wiggins (Speaker for the Dead). Ender had an uncanny way of understanding people and the situations that surround them. But his faith, if it could be said that he had one, was simply that of understanding. Ender could show people all of the illusions that had mislead them into hate and fear, but he wouldn't create illusions even to give hope and purpose. Earthseed may paint a harsh and mundane picture of existence, but at least it promised purpose and Destiny. These two characters seem to personify two sides of the narrowing range of ideas that I am searching through for understanding of the world I live in.
—Sean
