speculative fiction

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The BFS Recommends Kindred by Octavia Butler

Book Reviews Recommended Reads

There’s always a barrier between a reader and what they read—the reader knows they can always put the book down. This is particularly the case with a subject the reader thinks they know about already, as they’re further insulated from being affected by it, with their biases and previously drawn conclusions. But the best authors find a way to reduce or almost eliminate this barrier, to implode those implicit stances the reader places between them and the seemingly familiar concepts they’re encountering.

Octavia Butler was one author consistently able to do this (go read her story “Bloodchild” if you haven’t already: you’ll thank me), and she did so in particular with her 1979 novel, Kindred. This is the third novel I’ve read in the past couple years that uses a speculative fiction approach to tangle with racism. slavery, and antebellum America, but it’s undoubtedly the best of the lot. While Ta-Nehisi Coates’s The Water Dancer is worth reading for how powerfully it uses its themes of memory and heritage, and Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad intrigues with a Gulliver’s Travels style journey to explore race relations in America, neither of them wrestled with the these issues as successfully as Kindred.

Butler accomplishes this by having her protagonist, Dana, be a modern (well, 1979 modern), married Black woman forced to travel back to an early 1800s plantation in Maryland to save her white ancestor, Rufus. By means and for reasons that she is never able to determine, Dana is called to save Rufus when his life is in danger, but is sent back to her own timeline when her own life is put into danger. Her first stop is brief, with her pulling the young child Rufus from a river, providing mouth-to-mouth resuscitation, only to have the boy’s father point a gun at her, causing her to be sent back to her own timeline. But unfortunately for Dana, this is not the only instance where Rufus nearly dies (she’s called back to different moments in his life), meaning she is yanked back multiple times to the plantation Rufus’s father owns. After a few hours or days in her present, Dana is called back to find months or years have often gone by between her visits to Rufus’s timeline

And other than for that first visit, it is often months before she is able to return to her present, meaning she has to find some way to live on the plantation. While it’s hardly the most hospitable place, she has few other options: Rufus’s family grudgingly allows her a place to work and live (tinged with slight gratitude for saving Rufus), and any attempted escape north could cause Dana to be captured by patrols, resulting in her being sold as a slave to someone that is even worse than Rufus’s father (who only whips slaves when they “deserve it,” according to Rufus).

This setup means Dana’s (and the reader’s) previous thoughts and biases about the era are slowly and steadily removed. Octavia Butler said the idea for the novel came to her after a young Black man she knew vilified the generations that had come before them for their subservience to whites and racism, and you can see how the novel implodes his not-uncommon thought process. Dana attempts to soften Rufus as he grows older (and he does seem to respect her), but she is only able to do so much, given his family and the society he lives in. She also attempts to help and educate other slaves on the plantation, but again she is only able to do so much: and eventually the cost to her is great.

Dana is only human, in the end, capable of being whipped, shot, or torn at by dogs, and she wants to live. She wants to get back to her own era, and her husband. Once faced with that reality, the needed compromises to get by are seen and felt by her and the reader—any grandiose thoughts about how she might live or be different from other slaves are slowly worn away. While she befriends some other Blacks on the plantation, other slaves see her as dangerous—if not a spy for Rufus and his father, at the very least a “mammy” or a “whore,” worthy of their contempt.

As she goes back again, and again, the reader is forced to ask (as Dana and her husband also ask), why doesn’t she let Rufus die? But of course, then Dana herself wouldn’t exist. Nor would all the generations between Rufus and Dana herself. It’s not that simple. Ignoring all that, what would it mean for Dana to become a person that lets another die? Where would the separation be between her and Rufus? His father?

For all its dark subject matter—for all the physical, emotional, and mental pain Dana goes through—Butler doesn’t drown the reader in it. This is no small feat, as Amazon’s production of Whitehead’s Underground Railroad shows: its very first episode subsumes the reader in the violence of the era, simultaneously burying much of its main character’s story, making her seem a bystander to the narrative. While these are issues Whitehead’s novel generally does not have, they still highlight the danger in telling a story such as this. It is far too easy to caricature, distancing the viewer through extremes of one sort or another.

Kindred stands apart through its ability to find balance in its narrative. Like Dana, the reader can never stop hoping for something better. Seen in one way, that hope is a chain that enables slavery. Seen another, hope is the thing that makes life worth living.

On the Hopeful Darkness of The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle

Book Reviews Musings Recommended Reads

In a year already marred by insurrectionists storming the U.S. capitol building to dispute the results of an election in which hardly any instances of voter fraud occurred, I find myself comforted by Haruki Murakami’s best novel, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle—and disturbed by its all too accurate portrayal of the dark side of humanity.

Why is it that evil so easily seems to grow? How do the seeds of dissension so easily spread? Murakami’s novel rightly identifies media as one cause, with those who earn its seemingly random favor gaining a strange power to manipulate those around them. At one point the book’s main character, Toru Okada, is warned to be careful: “Those people are always glued to the television set. That is why you are so disliked here. They are very fond of your wife’s elder brother” (pg. 572).

Nor is it just being in media that confers power—it’s also how the media is used. Toru’s brother-in-law is so dangerous because he does not seem to hold any consistent values (other than the increasing of his own power). Rather than being problematic to his supporters and viewers, this lack of consistency actually works in the brother-in-law’s favor, which Murakami notes in a passage that will echo alarmingly to anyone who has paid any amount of attention to modern media (and politics), let alone the past week: “Consistency and an established worldview were excess baggage in the intellectual mobile warfare that flared up in the mass media’s tiny time segments, and it was his great advantage to be free of such things (pg. 75-76).”

It’s not all down to the media of course—hatred and evil find other ways to spread… sometimes in ways that are hard to understand and can almost seem like a tidal wave. In a passage that is by turns hilarious, disgusting, and soberingly accurate, Toru captures this phenomenon by telling the story of the monkeys of the shitty island.

‘Somewhere, far, far away, there’s a shitty island. An island without a name. An island not worth giving a name. A shitty island with a shitty shape. On this shitty island grow palm trees that also have shitty shapes. And the palm trees produce coconuts that give off a shitty smell. Shitty monkeys live in the trees, and they love to eat these shitty-smelling coconuts, after which they shit the world’s foulest shit. The shit falls on the ground and builds up shitty mounds, making the shitty palm trees that grow on them even shittier. It’s an endless cycle […] What I’m trying to say is this: A certain kind of shittiness, a certain kind of stagnation, a certain kind of darkness, goes on propagating itself with its own power in its own self-contained cycle. And once it passes a certain point, no one can stop it—even if the person himself wants to stop it. (202)

If one can’t tell from the humor of that ingenious passage, Murakami is incredibly apt at making heady moral and philosophical ideas accessible. But he is especially able to do this because of the ordinariness of his main character. Not unlike Bilbo in The Hobbit, Toru Okada is the best possible protagonist for this kind of narrative. He is so utterly normal, so utterly grounded, it’s hard for a reader not to appreciate his stability, even as bizarre, otherworldly things begin to happen. The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle is a Haruki Murakami novel, after all, and that means you’re in for strange, psychic dreams and dark netherworlds that wouldn’t feel out of place on the X-Files or Twin Peaks (as I noted in my review of Murakami’s Wind/Pinball).

Just in the first chapter alone, a strange woman keeps calling Toru on the phone, insisting that he knows her very well, even though he doesn’t recognize her voice or manner at all… before she takes the conversation in a in a racier direction (“Oh, great. Telephone sex,” Toru thinks to himself before hanging up on her). And then the teenaged girl Toru meets while searching for the his lost cat seems to be rather morbidly obsessed with death. Everyone he encounters is a little strange, a little off, and Toru’s equanimity in encountering them all keeps drawing the reader in.

The balance Toru brings only continues as the aforementioned psychics and strange dreams start to arrive in the novel’s narrative. “What does it all mean?” any reader is bound to ask, but Toru’s even-keeled nature and the connections that are revealed between smaller strange events lead a reader to trust that all the bigger ideas and mysteries Murakami is juggling will come together somehow. And they do—thanks much in part to why this oftentimes somber novel is able to comfort me. Even as Toru uncovers a human darkness that grew out of some of the darkest events of World War II—itself one of the darkest times in human history—he finds a group of like-minded souls, individuals that have learned (or come to learn) how to feel for their fellow humans and to help them.

Still, it all seems so fragile, so impossible. Toru Okada is out of work and his cat has disappeared, shortly before his wife disappears as well. And his primary antagonist is his wife’s elder brother, a rising media star and politician that has all the power and all the cards. It begins to feel like there’s no way that Toru can win and unravel the mystery of those missing in his life, no matter what friends he finds on the way.

But if a small group of humans can continue on, healing the world around them—no matter how high the cost—maybe it’s okay to feel some hope as my own life has been hit by a real-life media (kind of) star and politician that is wreaking his own brand of havoc on this world that I love so much. Like Toru, I choose to descend into the darkness again, for those who seem to be lost to it… unless I can help them find their way out.