Sarah's Reviews > Parable of the Sower

I read this book in its entirety on the bus from New York back to Baltimore. It's a strange thing reading a dystopian novel on public transportation. After every chapter I paused and looked around: at the cars traveling in both directions, obeying commonly accepted rules of the road; and at the forty five strangers sitting around me, all adopting a social contract in which we sit quietly for three hours, keep our own personal space, and leave others to their seats, their money, their food, their coats, their belongings. I thought about the home-compounds I've seen in South Africa, surrounded by high walls and razor wire, guarded by dogs, and how those do not make the walled community at the start of this novel such a stretch, even if the world outside those walls is not as bleak as the one depicted here.

I tend to wade into dystopian novels carefully. My tendency to apply whatever I'm reading or listening to or watching to real life makes it a bad idea for me to read bleak books. The Road turned me into a hermit for weeks. Thankfully, Butler managed to weave a thread of hope into Parable of the Sower. It helped that the narrator, Lauren, is a teenager. She is pragmatic but not completely jaded. She has grown up in the world as it is, and doesn't harbor memories of the world as it was. There are many incidents in the book that were difficult to read, but I was too wound up in Lauren's story and had to keep going to find out what happened to her.

There are actually a number of similarities between The Road and Parable of the Sower; so many that I can't help but wonder if McCarthy's book is in some way a response to this one. McCarthy's novel got far more attention, but I think Butler actually paints the more accurate picture of humanity, for good and for bad.