[Comments] The Parable of the Sower

[Fillyjonk]

July's Book Whew---the summer doldrums are real, so here is a fun one as we head into August: The Parable of the Sower, a dystopian tale of a blazing Los Angeles by multiple Huge and Nebula award winning author Octavia Butler. I've read and loved other Butler novels, but this one is new to me. In 2020, this book was adapted into a graphic novel that won the Hugo, hit the NYT Bestseller list, and is currently in development as a film as A24, the gonzo film studio that brought us Everything Everywhere All At Once, Midsommar, and Hereditary. I plan to read both the original novel and the graphic novel but you can pick one or the other, and we can compare notes. This is also the place to start putting in suggestions for September!

[Sprite]

Oh, excellent! This book has been on my to-be-read list for way too long

[Wynamoinen]

Graphic novel version! Hey my dum-dum brain can justify reading that around the edges of the other books I'm trying to work through. (Don't tell that dum dum that all I'm reading nowaways is serial graphic novels, having fallen into the Webtoon wormhole).

Ready for a story about someone stitching clothes together with a needle shaped like a U-shaped conic section.

[bothers]

Currently 50% of the way through the novel, and it's been veering into grimderp territory for me from the very early pages. How's everyone else getting on with it?

[Fillyjonk]

I am seven chapters in. It’s pretty brutal.… So glad to hear it gets worse… heh.

One thing that is helping me is the matter of fact tone. There’s no horror. There’s no lingering on details. It’s just a flat statement of how the world is. Which is very very horrifying actually but I can tolerate it. I like the narrator’s voice very much, and I like her relationship with her father so far. I love how much she loves him and doesn’t want to disappoint him.

[Wynamoinen]

Oof, yeah, I’m 50 pages into the graphic novel and I don’t know that I can hack this. Nonstop oppressive grimness. The graphic novel is not giving me a good sense of the narrator’s voice (they are putting narration on lined notebook paper, which I guess must be a reference to something? Is this a diary in the novel?) nor does she seem to like much of anything. Which is fair enough, everything seems terrible. But this is very much not my jam of genre.

[Fillyjonk]

I am going to say some things in a spoiler button because there are SPOILERS —- but only for the first half You are warned…

ALSO I am on a farm, on my phone, so forgive the BOOGERY TYPING.

 

Okay this is Great Literature. Capital G and L. I acknowledge the greatness, but MAN it is a brutal read. The death of Amy was a blow, and the murder of Keith was a hard thing to read. I honestly think I made a solid choice to take text over the graphic novel, because the flatness of her delivery is keeping me from walking into the sea. She states things so matter-of-factly. This is how the world is. No lingering and no surprise, no shock. It’s good she is so young. This is the only world she knows. For this reason, I also find the flatness devastating. It’s not the horrors she recounts that floor me; it is this baby creature’s normalization of these events. It’s incredibly effective — and prescient.

The fact that it is 2024, the income disparity and despair, the weather events from climate change also make this feel REALLY uncomfortable and relevant.

I am going to LOOK at the graphic novel, after, MAYBE, but for sure not read it. I don’t want to see some images. Do they show Keith? I can’t see that face. NOPE.

I have a bad strange terrible hope abotu the dog she made so much of—This novel needs a good, alive dog that is not ever brutally killed. It needs it VERY badly. HEH.

here is an RPG thought—or rather, a DnD one, as I am a pretty faithful-to-5e person.

What she does with Keith is really smart and merciful. I do it as a DM, and the best DMs I have do it, too. KEITH IS A TOOLBOX. We do not LIKE Keith. He is pig-stupid and a murder hobo. The death of Amy is gentler, faster, instant. Just a randomness. It would be intolerable if what happened to Keithhad happened to Amy I would set the book down, light it on fire, and never look back. So she takes this NPC we do not like and who is bad to SHOW us the horror of the world. Not our pet little HIN NPC we have toted through two dungeons. No, it is the dumb son of the tavern keeper who throws rocks at horses. WE HATE THAT GUY. And yet, because this BADNESS happens to him, we understand it can happen to our pet NPC Hin, or even to another PC. SO the stakes get raised, but we don’t hurl the table over, throw our dice in the trash…

This mercy is wholly absent from, say, The Road. ALSO, this is EARLY ON. I worry this is a “softening mob” sort of death, to ready me for what she will do later. I hope not. Keith was my limit. When I was younger and more heartless I read the Road. It is not a book I would finish now. I HOPE that we are heading toward FREEDOM AND HOPE. The plans, the new religion, the fact there is a sequel make me believe we are walking toward a dawn.

[Wynamoinen]

I think you're probably right about the merciful distance of text. But it sounds to me like the book and the graphic novel might have taken a slightly different approach to the narration? Half the time in the graphic novel, the notebook-lined narration is very matter-of-fact about the garbage heap the world has become, in the way you're describing. But the other half, it's very much "the world is nothing but pain, and I have a superpower to feel all the pain; here's me feeling it." In the first 15 pages, that includes 'feeling' open festering pustules, severed limbs, and TWO separate instances of

 

mass rape!

So yeah, the graphic novel is not exactly distancing itself from awfulness; it's building it into the core of the narrator. And the art style is very bleak: everything is sepia dry and red aflame and black despair. You literally can't avert your eyes from the motif of ruin and hopelessness.

[bothers]

Sometimes I wonder if I'm broken, because all the grimdark-bleak-bleak-grim-oh-no-the-world-is-so-terrible has absolutely no effect on me whatsoever, beyond the occasional eyeroll. I don't care about any of the people or what happens to them. I'm like this with The Road as well, FWIW. Big shrugs all round.

I also notice from reviews that a lot of Americans find Parable of the Sower very prescient and relevant, and I wonder how much of my lack of care is down to a lack of US perspective, because here in the UK we just don't have the same social structures. The thought of, for example, not being able to afford to call the fire service is quite far removed from the UK experience so maybe it's harder for me to see the socioeconomic breakdown on display here as plausible.

 

The US in this book (or maybe just California, not sure) is a dried-out hellhole with the majority of the population living in squalid shanty towns that are constantly being burned down and robbed and the inhabitants tortured and murdered and left strewn around the landscape to be eaten by feral dogs.

There is also a functioning college system, and Lauren's father and her stepmother are both employed by it. Who exactly is going to college in this comprehensive Mad Max wasteland? It can't be the poor people, like Lauren's family, because they can barely afford to clothe themselves. It's so dangerous in this place that the moment you set foot outside you are set upon by drug-addled kill-seekers, perverts, robbers, drug dealers, murderers etc etc, so I've a pretty hard time believing that the rich people are heading off to college in the middle of this either. And there's an (apparently) functioning electoral system, too. Who is voting in this environment? And how? And why? How is there enough municipal structure for colleges and elections in the middle of all *gestures at the worldbuilding*?

 

Oh, only two instances in the graphic novel? It's pretty much continual in the original. I've said above that the bleakness on display here gives me no particular emotional feeling, and that also goes for the truly absurd level of rape in this novel (exclusively perpetrated against women, I can't help noticing), which has got my eyes rolling so hard they're about to ping right out of my skull into low earth orbit.

Here's another implausibility: if the pyro addicts think that watching things burn is better than sex, why are they raping their way across the country? If people living outside are mostly poor and filthy and starving, why are they raping their way across the country? Don't they have more pressing tasks on which to spend their limited resources? What on earth is the point? The point, some would say, is that there is no point! The brutality is inherently pointless, which is what makes it shocking, which, fine. But. What is missing is any kind of internal consistency.

All of this to say: Butler is using rape of women as grimmy grim grim background decoration, and its this more than anything else that cheapens the narrative for me. I can see the tawdry emotional manipulation she's tryna pull on me, and it ain't working.

[Fillyjonk]

So in the book

 

They are on the way to church for the baptism and they see a filthy naked blank eyed woman staggering down the street. She posits, flatly, that the woman has been raped to the point of insanity and will soon die and she tells us, flatly, that as an empath it’s bad when she is present for such events. Nothing on screen. Very few details.

[Wynamoinen]

@Filly:

 

yeah, pretty similar in the graphic novel. Except you get the repeated image of this broken naked woman on the page

I guess I’m delicate. I can’t really deal with all this grimdark. I can eyeroll in retrospect, but as I read it, it’s really hard for me to tolerate.

[Wynamoinen]

Stray thought re: does this ring more true for Americans.

A lot of early American Utopianism is tied up with evangelicalism (the second great awakening). So the vision of making the world better is part of a vision of this world as being fallen and getting worse - millenarianidm, eschatology, the “end times” etc. So I think there could be an argument that with this vision of the new world, being fallen is part of the optimism of what’s to come. I haven’t read far into the book, so I don’t know how deep the book gets into it, but religion is clearly a big theme in the early pages. Perhaps ironically (perhaps not) I think sectors of the environmental movement share some of these themes.

That said, I’m not a Californian nor religious, so to answer bothers’ question: as an American, no, this vision of the country does not ring true for me at all. But a certain breathless vision of permanent collapse is definitely part of the American vision/conversation in some broad sense.

[Fillyjonk]

SA and then WHAT I LIKE — Past the halfway point

 

ABout the SA: she seems to imply strongly Keith was raped when he first snuck out. Not that it makes it any better. bothers, It’s interesting it feels manipulative to you. Not to me. But for me, this is because she feels very truthfully to me be a product of both her time and her place. Is it manipulative for a writer to make you want to feel deeply? As a writer, I want to make readers feel deeply. I feel it first, though. I have cried and cackled like a loon while writing, because the things I am saying matter so deeply to me. I don’t picture Butler the writer as puppetmastering at all. I imagine her feeling it.

Because I a hard on book club books, I always seem to be saying UM ER BUT MEH WAH, I will tell you things I am liking:

1) Lauren’s faith in herself to do hard things and found a new religion.Her faith in humanity to be BETTER THAN THIS

2) I DO like the drugs. They feel magic—I like the weird drug her mom was addicted to that made her have her hyper-empathy and the weird fire drug in that you fall so in love with the high you will literally burn yourself up, be consumed by it, watch as it eats your friends. This feels like a nice removal from wealthy and a metaphor for meth and those other drugs that just eat you from the inside out and steal everything that makes you YOU.

3) Racism exists, but the book is not about Blackness. This was a goal of Octavia Butler, to write books about futures where Black people were relevant and the hero not in spite of or because of, but just as a truth. This was a goal of hers—- she called it “Writing me in.” She wanted diverse casts and inside these casts, for a woman of color to be the hero.

4) The writing is great. Just great. Sleek and economical and visual and voices and accessible.

5) The religion she is inventing. I like the verses, the ideas, and I like the opposition with her dad’s religion…

I am entering the second half now, and I am starting to see ways this could turn and be hopeful. I AM PAST READY FOR THIS.

[bothers]

Originally Posted by Wynamoinen

But a certain breathless vision of permanent collapse is definitely part of the American vision/conversation in some broad sense.

Interesting, thanks! Definitely a framing I'll be mulling over as I go through it. The religion theme does continue - I looked up some spoilers and it becomes more important as the story progresses, though it's not really something I have any familiarity with. I do wonder how much of the religious background of the author is coming through (Wikipedia tells me that Butler was raised Baptist, like Lauren) in the story, I guess are going to be some nuances there that I don't have access to. I don't think I'd have been able to make the environmentalist connection for myself, for example!

The novel is written in the form of diary entries, btw, which will explain the notebook designs in the graphic novel adaptation. She's writing a diary and a religious/cult manifesto in her journal as she goes along - a lot of the chapters open with her musings on the nature of God and this nascent cult that she comes to refer to as Earthseed (I don't think this is spoilery as it all gets established early on).

[Fillyjonk]

Wynamoinen …I agree it feels American and the climate change stuff is prescient and smart and way ahead of its time.

We need something HILARIOUS for next month. Whimsical. Light. Bring on the FUNNY vampires or a space ship who is willing to do a prat fall… Any suggestions?