The following review contains spoilers. It was the only way to explain how awful the latter half of the book is.
Octavia Butler’s Fledgling starts off with a mystery and a bang. A girl wakes up naked, alone, nearly-dead and in a cave. Who is she? What happened to her? Who did it? Will she survive? But the second half of the book is a clunky fantasy version of the Order side of a Law and Order episode. Butler tried to weave multiple touchy subjects together into a courtroom drama under a legal system of her own invention. The result is tedious.
When we first meet the protagonist, she has no name. The twenty something hunk who finds her on the side of the road names her Renee. She bites him, because unknown to either of them she is a vampire. In the Fledgling milieu, vampires do not turn humans into more vampires. Instead they are another species that forms symbiotic relationships with humans. The vampires get to drink blood and order their humans around. The humans get to live healthier and longer, but they cannot live without frequent bitings from their vampire.
Wright (the young hunk) and the soon to be renamed Shori soon discover a burned out community of farmhouses, what turns out to be the wreckage of Shori’s home, though she never remembers those details. She slowly regains some of her mental faculties, but never any actual memories. A second community of vampires rescues them, but that group is quickly attacked and wiped out too. So Shori, Wright, and two other human refugees head to yet another vampire family for protection. There they fight off attackers yet again, this time finding clues as to who is out for Shori blood. Armed with their few clues, a vampire court is held where Shori takes on all her enemies in a battle of wits.
I loved the first part of the book. Action all around. Shori slowly learning about what she is and how she is supposed to live. No memory. Particularly no cultural memory. Butler also puts Shori through a gamut of situations that seem designed to push buttons. Although we learn later that she is over 50 years old, she has the body of a 12 year old girl (with sharp teeth). Her relationship with Wright turns sexual very quickly. Although we readers didn’t know at the time that she was older, I wasn’t too bothered. I just knew there would be something revealed that would make that not so icky. You want another button? How about cannibalism? Or May December lesbianism? Or (though not revealed until later) some polyamory with a very dominant center of the family unit? I don’t know that Butler was trying to say anything in particular with all this, but she was very definitely pushing the boundaries of what is commonly in fiction. Perhaps not with each tweak individually, but by putting them all together there are definitely going to be some uncomfortable people.
Probably not the most apt thing to compare it to, but I kept comparing Shori’s lack of cultural memory to that experienced by young slaves brought to America from Africa, ripped from their families and tribes. In a lot of respects, it’s really not the same. Slaves had families on the plantations to teach them all about that culture. But it’s not the same as the community they were part of prior to coming to America. Like Shori, they were cut off involuntarily and violently from their heritage and have little way to connect with that.
But in Shori’s case, it doesn’t last very long. She eventually does find her vampire people. And they being teaching her how to be Ina. Ina are the vampires.
And this is where Fledgling starts to go wrong. Shori has to start learning things. So other Ina start explaining things to her. Complicated things. In a long drawn out fashion. Info dump after info dump after info dump. By the second half of the book, we’re subjected to an almost unbroken info dump. And it’s partially because of how many buttons Butler inserted into the text. These things have to work together, and they are complicated. That requires complicated explanations.
Since the vampires and their humans are symbiotic, the humans are called symbionts. The vampires call them that; they call themselves that. All the time. Almost to the point of saying Hello, my fellow symbiont
every time. What an awkward word! I never want to hear the word again. Too much!
One of the things the reader learns early on is that Shori is dark-skinned. Some Ina are trying to breed vampires that don’t have to sleep during the day and aren’t so affected by sunlight, which fries normal vampires (though it doesn’t kill them). Yep, that sounds like eugenics to me. Already that’s getting into dangerous ground, though Butler handles that part in a way that’s fairly benign. But of course, other vampires do not like this development, this mixing not only of the dark skinned and light skinned, but also that of humans and Ina. So now we have racism thrown in. Butler’s handling of race in her Parable series was awesome. Here, it’s paint by numbers. The racist bad guys differ little from the standard genteel redneck
trope. It’s boring. There’s no nuance.
This latter part of the book is dominated by a vampire trial. After one vampire rips apart the U.S. legal system (for humans), the supposedly better Ina system is described. Instead of a rule-based system that is all about who has the better lawyer or the most money, the Ina’s system is… well, I’m not exactly sure how it’s better. While supposedly designed to get the truth despite technicalities, it seems instead to depend on loyalties between families. And perhaps even more rule-bound than anything us lesser humans came up with. How species with a 10,000 year written history would manage to avoid a court bureaucracy I don’t know. They don’t really though. There are all sorts of rules.
This trial is so extremely boring. We go from action in the first part of the book to psychological mind games played between clueless Shori and knee-jerk reactionary vampires. Shori let’s her temper get the better of her, gets chided by her elders, then plays her part perfectly. Her opponents pull the classic Jack Nicholson move from A Few Good Men
; they lose their cool and scream in the courtroom when prodded, thus revealing their guilt.
Butler attempted a lot, and that’s to be commended. But the execution in the latter half of Fledgling makes this just awful reading.
A few other blogged reviews:
Title: Fledgling
Author: Octavia E. Butler
Imprint / publisher: Seven Stories Press
Format: Hardcover
Length: 316 p.
Publication date: October 2005
ISBN-10: 1-58322-690-7
I’ve seen so many rave reviews of this that even if I end up disagreeing about the lack of nuance and the execution it’s good to readjust my expectations.