PARABLE OF THE TALENTS
By Octavia E. Butler
Seven Stories Press, 365 pages, $24.95
Sometimes writers looking to the future make a claim upon the present that can’t be denied. In 1949, George Orwell did this when he published “1984,” his dissection of the modern state and its potential for tyranny. In 1985, Margaret Atwood explored the brutal intersection of politics, gender and power in “The Handmaid’s Tale.” Now, Octavia E. Butler, in her 10th novel, “Parable of the Talents,” challenges us with a vision of a future where environmental crisis, economic injustice and frustration with government have destroyed the foundations of society and left behind a world desperate to find something to believe in, desperate to discover some cause for hope.
“Parable of the Talents” continues the struggles of Lauren Oya Olamina to survive the apocalyptic years of the early 21st Century. Butler introduced Lauren in the 1993 novel “Parable of the Sower,” which followed Lauren’s journey from a walled community in Southern California to a nascent commune of Lauren’s own making in northern California. Those who read “Parable of the Sower” have been waiting for the continuation of this story, but one of the remarkable things about “Parable of the Talents” is that it contains everything a new reader of Butler would need to know to pick up Lauren’s story at this point. That isn’t to say that “Parable of the Sower” should be disregarded–the novel is a fine book in its own right–but Butler’s skill in presenting the perspectives of the characters who narrate and provide background on the events of “Parable of the Talents” allows any reader to appreciate this novel on its own.
The events in the novel take place from 2032 to 2035, and most of what happens is described in Lauren’s journals, though Lauren’s daughter does provide a perspective from more than 50 years in the future. The world of the novel is not a future of technological miracles or universal harmony. This future suffers the effects of global warming and the return of indentured servitude and slavery, and the years of disappearing opportunities and fear have opened the political arena to demagogues who would return the U.S. to an imagined past Christian Eden of order and obedience.
“Consider–/We are born/Not with purpose,/But with potential.” These words are from “Earthseed: The Books of the Living,” a philosophy Lauren calls “a collection of truths” that she began to keep when she was 12 and that have grown into the tenets of belief for the religion Lauren and the members of her community, Acorn, practice as part of their rituals and social purpose. The bases of these beliefs are expressed in “The First Book of the Living,” the first of her verses in “Earthseed”:
“All that you touch/You Change./All that you Change/Changes you. The only lasting truth/Is Change. God/Is Change.”
This philosophy is at the heart of the conflicts between characters in the novel: Lauren’s husband wants her to abandon Acorn for the safety of an older town even though it is crumbling into the sea and being deserted by its inhabitants, who are immigrating to places like Siberia and Alaska; Lauren’s daughter grows up separated from her mother and without Earthseed, and as an adult rejects and resents her mother’s beliefs; and the members of Christian America, an extremist sect, seek to destroy Earthseed and its adherents.
Acorn and the world around it are competing for the future of not only the body of society but also its spirit. Lauren’s world demands “adaptability and persistent, positive obsession” and, like our own, requires an awareness of the potential for “destructive fanaticism.” This philosophy may seem a hard response to a destructive world, but there is human warmth as well in Lauren’s beliefs. When she is asked, ” `If God is Change, then . . . then who loves us? Who cares about us? Who cares for us?’ ” Lauren responds, ” `We care for one another.’ “
Faced with these conflicts, Lauren’s story could easily descend into bathos and despair. There is certainly enough pain here for several novels. But there is also triumph, which comes honestly and with a real sense of achievement. Lauren’s commitment to her truths makes her losses poignant and her accomplishments satisfying, even if they are, inevitably, incomplete.
Butler has crafted a complex novel in which problems are treated realistically and solutions are slippery, partial and, at best, only able to lead toward new questions and challenges. The book is a remarkable step forward for Butler, who has received two Hugo Awards for her science-fiction writing and a MacArthur Foundation “genius” award.
Butler has found in the competing voices and ideas of “Parable of the Talents” a means of engaging the discourse of our times on questions of class, religion, ecology, violence, gender and community. The passages from “Earthseed: The Books of the Living” scattered throughout the novel are an invitation to the thoughtful reader to consider where we are now, where we are going, and how we might best move forward together.
