Parable of the Sower by Octavia Butler
Cover art by John Blackford
Published by Grand Central Publishing
Reviewed by Leigh Kimmel
I originally discovered Octavia Butler through her novel Dawn, the first volume of the Xenogenesis trilogy (later retitled Lilith's Brood). It was an after-the-Bomb novel that was a ray of hope amidst all the We're All Gonna DIE fiction and non-fiction that was coming out in the last decade of the Cold War.
And there is a similar theme of hope amidst the ruins in this novel as well. I originally became acquainted with it while writing an article about Octavia Butler's novels. However, at that time I didn't have time to give the book a proper reading, and just had a general impression of the story from secondary sources. The idea of a religion based upon the idea that God is Change really stuck with me, being a diametric opposition with the unchanging God of the Abrahamic faith traditions. So it seemed to be perfect reading material for reconciling the mind with increasingly uncertain times.
Parable of the Sower is presented as the journal of the protagonist, Lauren Olamina, a young woman growing up in a walled community in the outskirts of Los Angeles. She begins her journal in 2024, which was more than thirty years in the future when the novel was originally written and published in 1990. At that time, the idea of California devolving into walled and gated enclaves surrounded by a chaos of bandits, druggies, and desperate refugees seemed inconceivable. That was the sort of thing one saw in Third World countries, not the United States.
However, the end of the 1990's saw the development of gated communities, which were not necessarily walled to exclude deliberate intrusion, but generally had limited access to discourage casual entry by persons who were not residents or guests of residents. The subsequent economic shocks of the Dot-bomb crash, 9/11 and the 2008 housing crash have led to economic stagnation and increasing suspicion of individuals regarded as outsiders, as 'baggage" or otherwise a drag on the productive part of society. Especially with the disruptions of the COVID-19 pandemic and the civil disturbances that have followed the death of George Floyd at the hands of the police, the world portrayed in this novel is no longer quite so far-fetched.
When we first meet Lauren, she is a teenager struggling to figure out her place in the world. Her mother was a drug addict who abused an Alzheimer's drug, and as a result Lauren has been born with hyperempathy syndrome, a condition in which she feels the pain of others as a physical thing. It actually makes medical sense, since a treatment for Alzheimer's would probably involve stimulating the brain to grow new neurons. Abused by a pregnant woman, such a drug would probably result in overgrowth of neurons in the developing fetus. If they involved the mirror neurons, which are involved in empathy, it could very well result in a weakened sense of boundaries between the person and others.
Lauren's father, a Black Baptist minister and a professor at a nearby college, has since remarried and had additional children. Lauren's stepmother Corazon is Latina, and generally goes by the diminutive form Cory, since her anglophone neighbors find her actual name too difficult to pronounce. The community is racially mixed, and there is occasionally tension between people of different races -- but there is also tension between people of the same race.
Outside the walls of their community is a chaos of bandits and druggies, while inside the walls entropy is steadily eroding the material wealth of what had once been a reasonably prosperous middle-class neighborhood. Schools have ceased to operate, so Lauren helps her stepmother teach the children of the neighborhood in their home, making sure they have at least basic literacy and numeracy. With crime a constant peril, her father takes members of the community out into the countryside to practice with firearms so they will be able to defend themselves and their community. Everyone gardens and raises fruit trees, although this means having to decide how much scarce water should go to crops and how much to washing and cooking. Everything in their community has been repaired by hand time and again, and when things break, such as the big-screen television known as a Window Wall which had been the community's "theater," there is no way to replace them.
But there's just enough security that the adults can avoid recognizing just how bad things are becoming, even with hyperinflation making money so worthless that people think nothing of carrying a thousand dollars just to buy ordinary provisions such as bread and salt, even with corporations buying out whole towns and hiring people for a pittance, then entrapping them in debt so they can't leave, even with a new designer drug going around that leads its users to light fires to increase their highs. All the elders do is talk about the old days, and when the good times will come back. Even her father's Baptist faith doesn't really satisfy her, and in her struggles to understand the meaning of life, she begins to develop a philosophy she calls Earthseed, and writes out the verses in what she calls the Books of the Living.
The first sign of real trouble comes when Lauren's younger brother Keith takes off, leaving the community in search of independence in the world outside. He comes back with money and presents for the family, but has evasive answers about how he came to have them. He fell in with a gang of illiterates, and they paid him in money and merchandise for being able to read directions for them -- but it sounds like these illiterates are probably druggies and thieves, and everything he's bringing back is stolen.
And then karma strikes, as it always will. His body is in the morgue, and the family must go identify it. Although the adults try to shield the children, Lauren picks up the truth: Keith was tortured before he died, probably by rival gangsters.
Their little community also discovers that walls and gates provide only limited security. An elderly neighbor becomes the victim of a robber who came over the wall and assaulted her in her own home. After that, community members take turns standing watch every night, hoping to frighten off other bandits, but willing to kill if that is what is necessary to protect their own.
Then comes the day when Lauren's father doesn't come home from his work at the University. When it becomes clear he didn't just stay the night, Lauren helps with an expedition to find his remains, and comes face to face with the knowledge that some of the vagrants and druggies have turned cannibal, and her father may well have been not only robbed and murdered, but also butchered and eaten.
And then comes the night when everything falls apart. The gate is forced and druggies high on pyro come pouring in, torching the houses and robbing or killing everyone they can find. Lauren manages to escape, but she sees her stepmother and younger brothers dead in the melee.
The next morning she is able to connect with two surviving members of their community, who salvage what little they can, including money buried in jars in the back yard. With all the houses rendered uninhabitable and no way to maintain security, they join the multitudes of refugees trekking northward in hopes of reaching some place where they can have a modicum of security without becoming debt peons in one or another company town.
It doesn't take long to realize just what a sheltered life they'd led within their walled community. Even such a trifling thing as being seen eating a few almonds can make a person a target for robbery and brutalization. They have to learn to be streetwise, and quickly, if they're not to become prey to the robbers that are everywhere along the deteriorating roads where the only vehicular traffic is the company trucks.
Which means that it is that much harder to extend trust when it becomes increasingly clear that three is just not a big enough group to be safe, particularly at night. One by one they connect with other travelers in similar dire straits: two sisters fleeing an abusive father, escaped slaves from a company town that's gone beyond mere debt peonage, and an older man who's trekking from San Diego to his sister's farm up near San Francisco. Lauren begins to develop a relationship with him, and he begins to see the possibility that additional people could be welcome at his sister's farm, as additional hands to help with the labor, additional guards to stand watch against those who have turned predator on their fellow human beings.
One of the neatest things for me is the scene where Jill (one of the two sisters) has missed seeing an intruder in the camp (who turned out to be a woman with a small child, fleeing yet another of the horrors that the US has become), and her sister asks whether Lauren wants her to apologize on her knees. Instead of demanding ritual humiliation, Lauren says instead that she wants Jill to love her own life and that of her sister so much that she will not leave them at risk like that again. And shortly thereafter, when trouble actually comes, Jill is the one who protects one of the children at the price of her own life.
When they finally arrive at their Promised Land, it's a bittersweet homecoming. No, there will not be a joyous reunion with Bankole's sister and her family. Even an isolated farmstead is not far enough away from those for whom destruction is delight, for whom other human beings are prey.
However, Octavia Butler's characters do not give in to despair, even at this horrific moment. Amidst the ruins, Lauren sees that yes, this is a place where they can build a new community. Away from the ruins, back where it's easier to conceal, easier to defend, and they will call it Acorn, because like the mighty oak that grows from the acorn, something great will grow from this place.
Reading it, I keep thinking of The Last Centurion, and what John Ringo's protagonist Bandit Six says about the importance of trust in a functional civilization. Lauren's childhood is as good as it is because her father has created a community of trust within the walls of their neighborhood. Yes, there are problems here and there, conflicts between families and within families, but on the whole, people trust one another. The family who had the Window Wall was able to trust their neighbors to come in and watch shows on it and respect their property, rather than getting stupid drunk and damaging it or the like. They trusted their neighbors to use firearms to protect themselves and others, not to use them to carry out strong-arm tactics and take the belongings of those who had something they coveted. Even something as simple as walking down the street while eating from a bag of almonds was possible because the residents could trust one another.
It was only when that little community was destroyed that Lauren and her surviving neighbors realized just how fragile, and how important, that trust was. Suddenly they had to unlearn the habits of a life in which trust could be presupposed, and to learn to conceal all sorts of things, to keep a watchful eye on anyone who approached them.
But to build, to create the dream that was Earthseed, they had to learn to trust once again, but this time judiciously, with discernment of who was worthy of that trust, who could be relied upon to reciprocate their trust and not steal from them, not betray them to the bandits and druggies, or even the increasingly corrupt cops. Even the ending, bittersweet as it is, is a reflection both of the importance and the fragility of trust in a world in which it is not reciprocated generally throughout the society.
Buy Parable of the Sower from Amazon.com
Review posted March 12, 2021
