In the quality of the writing, Parable of the Talents was a notch below Butler’s Parable of the Sower but just as equally full of good thought provoking ideas. I understand why Butler tore down what Lauren Olamina built in the first book, but I think story-wise it didn’t work as well because the building up of the next stage seemed so rushed at the end. But it’s only lesser in comparison to the previous book. Lauren Olamina’s story is very good and gives you a lot to chew on.
When we last left Earthseed, it was a small community called Acorn on the northern California coast. At the start of the novel, the group is some 60 odd strong. Olamina and her husband Bankole are fighting over where to live. Lauren wants to build Acorn and start up new Acorn’s around the country. Bankole wants to become the community doctor for a nearby town, which would give them some security. Olamina is pregnant, which makes the issue of security a little bit more important.
The other wrench thrown into the situation is a politician from Texas, Andrew Steele Jarret. There’s a couple of uncanny similarities between Jarret and George W. Bush. He’s a right-wing Christian conservative who starts a war that many support but quickly turns into a debacle for which he is blamed for mismanaging. Parable of the Talents was published in 1998, however. Before George W. Bush even declared for President. George W. Bush was not the head of an erstwhile religious movement as Jarret is. He merely tried to lasso the the evangelicals with whom he identified and let them pull him to victory. But I digress. Andrew Steele Jarret wants to raise the country to past glories by spawning a religious revival. Some of his more intolerant followers harass anyone not fitting their view of religiosity. Jarret does little to control them, though if I recall correctly from Parable of the Sower, control in the U.S. has broken down considerably across the board. Being considered a weird cult, Earthseed’s followers in Acorn have much to worry about.
Where Parable of the Sower most prominently focused on race, Parable of the Talents focuses on gender issues. None of them are really new, of course. Whether men or women should make decisions in the family has been discussed billions of times. Bankole is the one who wants security. Olamina is the one who worries about her legacy. That’s a little different from the typical. Olamina is the unquestioned leader, and she is leader despite an exaggerated female
sympathetic tendency: she feels the pain of those around her if she sees it. Butler also did something I don’t recall noticing in Sower but which stood out in the sequel: Lauren Olamina is described as very plain. Neither ugly nor beautiful. Leaders, particularly female leaders, are supposed to stand out physically.
Obviously, there’s a very strong religious component to the novel too. Butler takes Eastern non-theistic religions one step further and has Olamina creating a non-mystical religion, Earthseed. Basically it’s secular humanism dressed up in poetic verse. I wouldn’t find it very inspiring as a religion myself, and I suspect neither did Butler, without one tweak. Earthseed has a destiny: to send humanity to the stars. Olamina writes about the purpose sending people spaceward has several times in the her character’s parts of the novel. It gives them a focus on the future.
One thing that struck me while reading was that a key feature of religions is their ability to build community. Secular humanists, atheists, agnostics, and non-theists in general don’t build shared communities such as Acorn or churches. They don’t have places to congregate to reinforce each other’s beliefs. Not as a rule of thumb that is; exceptions abound. I’m not saying the Earthseed religion would never work, but I do think some of the binding influences that would be necessary weren’t really explored. In particular, the rushed and explosive growth of Earthseed at the end of the novel struck me as a bit unexplained given the circumstances.
Another large part of the religious element focuses on how Jarret’s Christian America
followers treat non-Christians. It takes religious intolerance to a high level: concentration camps. Minor spoiler I guess. Anyway, a lot of the techniques that Butler had these religious nuts use could have come not just from concentration camp history, but from the history of genocide in places like Bosnia and Rwanda and elsewhere. I wonder how much of that was intentional.
Lots of times left-wingers will repeat arguments that it could happen here
. I’m not so sure. Certainly America has used and continues to use tactics that we condemn in others, that we consider uncivilized. We have achieved a great amount of collective cognitive dissonance over things like torture and fascism. However, unlike places like Germany pre-World War II, we do not have a monoculture. We have a dominant culture, and it gets very ugly sometimes. But our dissenters are vociferous and hardy in a way you don’t see elsewhere. I think there’s a good chance their presence will prevent dystopic science fiction extremes such as Atwood presented in A Handmaid’s Tale or Butler here in The Parable of the Talents.
The last thing I noticed that I wanted to comment on was the relationship between Lauren Olamina and her daughter Larkin and brother Marcos Duran. It’s very similar to what could happen in a divorce. Larkin grows up not knowing her mother, or that she even is alive. Marcos hides Larkin from Lauren and vice versa, for very selfish but somewhat understandable reasons. Yet after Larkin discovers the ruse, she directs her anger at Lauren who didn’t sufficiently protect her. Marcos received little blame despite being a post-hoc accomplice to her abduction.
Larkin narrates the introduction to most of the chapters, and the bitterness is evident throughout. In early chapters, I kept wondering why that bitterness existed. Logically there’s no reason. Butler never spells it out for the reader, but as the chapters piled up I started to realize Larkin doesn’t necessarily follow logic. None of us do. We’re emotional creatures. Larkin, after she finds her mother, sees only Olamina’s fame and attention and devotion to Earthseed. All she sees is that she wasn’t a part of her mother’s life. Her mother has abrogated her paramount duty to her child and there’s no excuse whatsoever for it short of abandoning all other pursuits and resuming her proper
role as mother. It’s an ugly reaction, but that can be how we work sometimes.
Some other blogged reviews:
- Annwfyn in Writers of Color 50 Book Challenge
- Post-Weird Thoughts
- River Ridge Farm
- Notes from the Officer’s Club
- Soliloquy in Blue
- The Gentle Traveler
Title: Parable of the Talents
Author: Octavia E. Butler
Cover creator: John Blackford
Series: Parable of the Sower; 2
Imprint / publisher: Warner / Hachette
Format: Paperback
Length: 408 p.
Publication date: January 2007 (reissue)
ISBN-10: 0-446-67578-4
ISBN-13: 978-0-446-67578-9
Subject: Young women — Fiction
Subject: Twenty-first century — Fiction
LC classification: PS3552.U827 P38 2000
I do remember Olamina being described as plain, or at least as not femininely beautiful; this helps her pass as a man during the walk north.
Your observation about community is intriguing to me. One of the things I like to think about is the kinds of phenomena that tend to be religiously based and what it might take to build or create them in a secular setting. (I’m a religious person myself but believe strongly in a secular society.) Quiet places for contemplation, i.e. church buildings, are one example. The kind of community building that you’re talking about is another, and it can have far-ranging effects; the role of churches in the African-American civil rights movement is one obvious example.