Samadrita's Reviews > Parable of the Sower

For a long time I had naively held on to the notion that Octavia E. Butler is the African American counterpart to Ursula K. Le Guin - an assumption begotten out of the commonality that both their creations despite being shoehorned into the genre of science/speculative fiction epitomize realities of institutionalized sociopolitical inequities. Not only has my first foray into Butler's literary landscapes altered that idea greatly but compounded my respect for Le Guin's masterful way of letting the didactic veins in a narrative segue neatly with the plot pulse so that when one turns over the last page, the fatal blow to the gut has already been delivered along with the crucial message. Of course it is too early to discount Butler's calibre as a storyteller of grit but rest assured she is no Le Guin.

By this time I have devoured enough post-apocalyptic fiction to remain inoculated against both the horrors of disintegrating social orders relapsing into caveman-era violence and the poignancy of surviving groups regaining lost humanity and optimism in the end. But this does not mean I can remain unmoved in the face of even the umpteenth combination of potent story-telling, layered characterization and extrapolations of current reality to very probable catastrophic consequences in the future.
Rampant murder, mayhem, arson and pillage drive the plot ahead here. People get killed, raped, mutilated and cannibalized after every few pages. And yet none of the savagery of aforementioned actions registers with the reader.
To cut a long story short, 'Parable of the Sower' shows all the finesse of a bull in a china shop while revealing its many thematic concerns.

Lauren Olamina, the young adult protagonist, is a hyperempath with the ability to experience the physical pain of others and yet, ironically, it is her journal entries which are glaringly toneless and devoid of any discernible emotion. Even when she expresses her anguish at some tragic turn of events, only a resilient stoicism is palpable in her narrative voice. The occasional philosophical rumination that she rustles up hints at all the solemnity of fortune cookie sentiments. As is obvious from the blurb, there are issues of gender, class, race, sexual orientation, climate change and human conflict simmering beneath the surface of dystopian barbarity but they are all paraded one by one for the reader's benefit without a modicum of discretion. Sprinkling a narrative with sentences like 'So-and-so was also raped.' is hardly the ideal way to drive home the fact of pervasive misogyny.

Negatives aside, the book still deserves brownie points for the insightful commentary on religion if not for designating the individual capacity for empathy as the glue which binds together conflicting elements in a civilization.

Worship is no good without action. With action, it's only useful if it steadies you, focuses on your efforts, eases your mind.

In course of circumventing a minefield of dystopian evils in search of a safe haven, Lauren inadvertently establishes a new religious order centered more or less around the idea of secular humanism, intending it to be a guiding force to shape the future endeavours of the survivors she helps unite as a community. As per the aphorisms of Lauren's 'Book of Earthseed' aka the new age Bible, God is change, and only by accepting change and embracing the notion of diversity can the welfare of the human race be a realizable prospect. This is old wine in new bottle no doubt but there's an oh-so-unsubtle implication that although all core religious ideas are grounded in survivalist logic at the onset, they eventually fragment into toxic ideologies misused by various groups to advance their respective sectarian agendas.

The universe is God's self-portrait.

I am not really holding my breath but here's to hoping my next brush with Butler's writing fares better than this one.