So, another creeping infirmity makes it harder for me to focus for long on the printed (or ebook) page, and I have finally started listening to audio books. I started with two novels that, at first glance, could not be more dissimilar: Octavia E. Butler’s The Parable of the Sower and China Miéville’s The Last Days of New Paris. Despite their vast differences, they both describe worlds coming apart at the seams in violent ways, and that’s enough for me to yoke them together. I was going to attempt a dual review, but that seemed too much. So, I’ll write about Miéville’s story in the next review.
Ostensibly the diary of a teenager, Lauren Olamina, covering the years 2024-2027 (about thirty years after the novel’s publication), The Parable of the Sower is a grimly realistic imagining of life in a crumbling world of southern California. As a rule, I’m not a fan of post-apocalyptic fiction, but a few of these stories, like Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, as well as Sower have found a permanent place in our imaginations because they are so convincingly told.
Unlike many in this genre, there is at least hope, by the end of Parable of the Sower, that life can get better, that some seed has fallen on good ground. That is the point of the biblical parable: the sower casts his seed, but what sort of ground will the seed fall on, that is, what sort of people will absorb drastic change and turn it into something good?
The story begins in Lauren’s small community of some twenty-five houses and families, protected by a wall that is constantly having to be repaired because outsiders want in. Those outsiders live on the streets, stealing what they can, selling themselves if need be, getting high on a drug that drives them to set fires and to kill. It’s a world where a bit of order still exists; there is some government, money still works, taxes are collected, there are big stores where you can get anything for a high price, people can hold jobs at a few surviving institutions.
The rich also live in walled communities, but they are run by corporate entities with security forces. Ordinary people can go to those enclaves to find work, but they wind up in debt bondage as the price of safety. The rest of the communities, like Lauren’s, can call police but only if they can afford their fees and accept the risk of arbitrary treatment. Climate change has ruined much of the country, water is scarce and more expensive than food or fuel, but those are scarce too.
The inevitable happens one night when a mob, high of the pyro drug, smashes through the wall and sets fire to Lauren’s entire community, stealing everything they can find and killing anyone they get their hands on. So Lauren has to hit the road along with great hordes of people heading north to an equally uncertain future. She is joined by a couple of surviving neighbors and soon by a few others, including an older man who becomes Lauren’s lover.
Lauren writes down what happens to her and her group in plain, blunt language, quite free of emotion or any embellishment. It’s a hard, deadly world, and Lauren records it all as dispassionately as she can. Since we are reading a diary in the past tense, we are reasonably sure that Lauren survives, but there is always that edge-of-the-seat tension about what terrible thing will happen next, revealed in her dry matter-of-fact style.
That style is a little surprising, since she is a hyperempath. From birth, she has felt what others feel, at times just as intensely as they do. When she has to fight to survive, as she often does, she feels the pain of others and becomes debilitated, until the moment the other person dies and can feel no more. This is a condition she inherited from her mother, who was a drug addict, but she copes with it seemingly by shielding herself from emotional reactions to the dangerous life around her. Hyperempathy is a condition that can make her weak when action is called for so she conceals it from most people she meets.
She is also a philosopher and poet, steadily building in her writings the foundation for a sort of religion, called Earthseed. It is based on the idea that change is the one universal in life, that change is, in fact, God, or the closest she comes to believing in a deity. Her guiding principle is to be the change, to shape it as much as possible before it takes over and destroys you. Her writings, referred to as the Books of the Living, strike me as the sort of religion a clear-eyed teenager would imagine in the world she lives in: direct, simple, capturing a profound truth, and stripped of all the complicating truths someone living in a better organized and safer world would have the leisure to think about.
Parable of the Sower is a beautiful yet terrifying book because it presents such a convincing story of what life could be like when everything we build up around us for protection is torn away. Lauren is out there on the road, never sure who to trust, yet capable of forming relationships that might just have a chance to endure. It’s an unforgettable, great book. I want to read its sequel, Parable of the Talents, but I need to take my post-apocalypse in smaller doses, though that’s what Lauren and her friends can’t possibly do.
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