• Friday, 9 Aug 2024 9:00 pm

  Parable of the Sower

  by Octavia E. Butler

  Published 1993 345 pages

  

  In the near future of the year 2024, Lauren Olamina lives with her family in a gated suburb of Los Angeles. Climate change and economic collapse have transformed the United States into a semi-wasteland of poverty and barbarism. Society exists in name only; peace exists only insofar as it can be enforced with high walls and guns. Corporations have started taking over towns, and there’s talk of slave labour employed in factories near the Canadian border. Everywhere in between, the unhoused and the desperate scrounge and kill for another day.

  It’s miserable.

  For Lauren, whatever misery she avoids by living within tall walls in counterbalanced by her hyperempathy, a neurological disease that causes her to physically feel whatever those around her feel. She has inherited it from her drug-addicted mother, long out of the picture. She has a grip on it most of the time, but woe betides confrontation with a would-be attacker: anything she inflicts in self-defence is inflicted also in self-offence.

  Life changes from one day to the next. Lauren watches her once-secure neighbourhood come apart at the seams: first from within, as her brother gets involved with drug dealers on the outside—and then from without, when the neighbourhood is attacked by vagrants addicted to a drug that impels its users to burn anything they can get their hands on. Her home is destroyed and her family is slaughtered. She reconnects with a couple of survivors of the attack and with them casts off north, hoping to find a quiet spot to start anew, maybe where water isn’t so expensive, where life can be lived in a bit of peace. She also tentatively starts sharing with her travelling companions the foundations of a nascent religion—more of a personal philosophy—that Lauren calls Earthseed. It encourages self-reliance and self-determination and is oriented around the koan-like tenet of God is Change.

  On her northbound way, she forms an unlikely community with a dozen or so others, gently preaching Earthseed along the way. Though they’re a bit of a motley bunch, they share a common abiding sense of inner kindness (and a healthy dose of commonsense strength in numbers). Lauren emerges as their leader and shepherds them through a few moments of serious peril.

  And yet—for a world that we’re told hangs on the brink, and where the next peril seems always around the corner, Butler seldom puts her characters in the path of serious, imminent danger. The high points are never very high, but the lows are never particularly low, either. Lauren’s group is attacked—several times—but the action never seems serious, somehow; the baddies are talked down or chased off offscreen. At one point the group is nearly overtaken by a wildfire, and we wonder if one of the older or weaker members of the group is going to make it—but then the winds change and the wildfire moves off somewhere else. The world is full of peril and death comes nearly indiscriminately—just not for Lauren’s group ¹.

  Lauren’s hyperempathy also feels somewhat unplumbed as a concept. It’s a fascinating conceit that should open the door to all sorts of interesting scenarios—but it mostly just plays as a reason to pan away from conflict resolutions. When attacked, Lauren fires her gun until she’s completely incapacitated by pain, and then catches up on the action on her recovery. I wish we’d have gotten a scene where her sharing helps her connect with someone on a level that no one else can. A couple of other sharers join her group late in the story, but remain feebly truculent through the final pages of the book.

  Where the story shines, however, is in the details. Lauren’s observations of her travelling companions, the forethought into making it through the night, the offhand comments about toilet areas, or the price of water, or bathing—all of these make the world leap up and press on you. There’s a tense moment where the group is hiding from a firefight in the night, and a baby makes just enough noise to draw the attention of one of the survivors. The group watches the figure move around a burning truck, and look out into the darkness. The moment hangs with the distant figure and the fire and the whirling night all around. The texture of the world is grim but it’s very nearly tangible in its quality. It doesn’t feel like another world—it feels like ours. It feels like a few bad decisions could make it so.

  ---

  1. This is not strictly true—one of Lauren’s group does die, but they’re not part of Lauren’s Core Team, and they’re mostly mourned over the course of a single chapter.↩︎

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  Friday, 26 Jul 2024 6:30 pm

  The Custom of the Country

  by Edith Wharton

  Published 1913 331 pages

  

  Undine Spragg wants only two things in the world,

  two things which she believed should subsist together in any well-ordered life: amusement and respectability

  Both, she's certain, are bestowed by inclusion in the glamorous old money New York social scene, which she's uprooted her upper-middle-class family from Kansas to join. She's been in New York for two years when The Custom of the Country starts, but she's had no luck: she's on the outs.

  That is—until she captures the attention of Ralph Marvell, a dazzling gentleman from an old money family, who takes her for a simple girl and snaps her up. Marital bliss quickly sours, however, as they realise that they have nearly nothing in common. They have a child, Paul, in spite of their mounting displeasure in each other's company; Undine pays him almost no mind at all but Ralph loves him dearly and raises him solo (well, inasmuch as a Gilded Age American aristocrat can raise anyone solo).

  Too soon, Undine spends Ralph's meagre old-money stipend, and after a downturn in Business her father's allowance dries up. Ralph gives up an—admittedly limp—interest in an artistic career for a job in real estate to try and cover the mounting bills that Undine racks up on dresses, jewels, and parties. The debts accumulate, and by and by the game wears thin. When Ralph can (or will) no longer provide the life that Undine believes she deserves, she wangles a fake illness and sweeps herself off for Paris to woo someone who can (or will).

  This doesn't quite work out for Undine, and she suffers from a bit of a low period—one of a few throughout the novel—where boredom overtakes her and she finds her social station somewhat reduced. She manages to land on her feet by catching the eye of Raymond, Comte (and later Marquis) de Chelles, a French aristocrat who, as a Catholic, insists she annul her marriage to Ralph before he can marry her.

  Here, Undine is guided by an old acquaintance from her Kansas days, Elmer Moffatt. He's been a sporadic presence throughout the novel, waltzing serendipitously into offices and tearooms with an American swagger to compromise someone's ethics with a shady-seeming deal as a remedy to a key moment of strife. He's the template of the modern capitalist: confident, business-savvy, adept at landing on his feet even when the money doesn't go his way. In a novel full of flawed characters just trying to get their way, he's probably the most enjoyable to watch.

  To Undine's limbo woes of being stuck Catholically attached to someone she never sees, and Catholically unable to marry a man who might re-elevate her station, Moffatt innocently suggests leaning on Ralph's attachment to Paul—Undine, after all, technically has custody—to get him (that is, Ralph) to pony up the money for the annulment. Undine does get her way in the end, in a series of scenes that metamorphose Undine from a cunning and spoilt but fundamentally uncomplicated protagonist into a truly awful person, and see her wind up with the annulment she wanted, the money she needed, and the son she never cared for in the first place.

  Suitably equipped, she contrives to marry Raymond but quickly comes to realise that a life as the Marquise de Chelles isn't all it's cracked up to be. Raymond is freer with his money than Ralph was—but not by much. Family troubles eat up the family's finances, sequestering Undine in the de Chelles country home, far from Paris society where she longs to be. Raymond quickly loses interest in Undine as well, and where her previous beaux were ever-eager to please, Raymond is quick to dismiss her as a foreigner. Here again Undine is struck low, before Moffatt reappears with a final deal to grant her everything she ever wanted.

  * * *

  Much of the book is presented almost lightheartedly, the whims and trials of the fabulously wealthy and spoilt. I think that this is what makes the book fun, instead of tiresome and upsetting. But Wharton puts moments of deep pathos at key points throughout the story, as if to remind us that these are people, after all.

  There's a scene near the end of the book from the perspective of young Paul, now nine years old, wandering around the rooms of his palatial home, bored and confused and lonely. He wonders what happened to his father and why he never sees him anymore. He laments his missing stepfather, Raymond, no longer in the picture. He gets told off by a servant for trying to read one of the thousands of books on the shelves—they're rare editions and too precious to touch. He longs for the days when he was surrounded by family who loved him. His mother comes home but she can't be bothered with his evident interest:

  Paul, seeing his mother's softened face, stole his hand in hers and began: 'Mother, I took a prize in composition—'

  'Did you? You must tell me about it tomorrow. No, I really must rush off now and dress—I haven't even placed the dinner-cards.'

  Throughout the book, we're meant to sympathise only halfheartedly for the men that Undine leaves wrecked in her wake, but in this moment of pathos for Paul, the impact of her awfulness is made real.

  'Why, hullo, old chap—why, what's up?' [Paul's step-father] was on his knees beside the boy, and the arms embracing him were firm and friendly. But Paul, for the life of him, couldn't answer: he could only sob and sob as the great surges of loneliness broke over him.

  * * *

  Inconsolable children notwithstanding, The Custom of the Country is a very fun book. Undine is despicable, and it's hard not to relish her low moments. It tends a little bit towards the hamfisted on European/American relations late in the book—one character even delivers a monologue/tirade against Americanism—but the commentary on capitalism and business and money is good and sharp and only a little upsetting. The book is well-paced and quick, skipping over years at a time and catching us up on the interim over the course of a quick chapter—though we're sometimes told more than shown, which feels a little clunky. Familiar characters also have a tendency to wander unprompted in to wherever Undine happens to be, and this sort of contrivance repeatedly drives a not-insignificant amount of the plot, but I guess this kind of thing is expected in a book of this era and at any rate it's not distracting. A well-constructed and fun, if at times a bit heartbreaking, romp through some terrible people's lives.

• ---

  Tuesday, 25 Jun 2024 12:18 pm

  The God of Small Things

  by Arundhati Roy

  Published 1997 340 pages

  

  It's not a bad book. I like the way that language gets recontextualised via the perspective of children, although I think it gets a little heavyhanded after 300 pages. I like the nonlinear structure: it gives the book a sort of fatalistic quality. Things don't happen; they've always been and always will be. This means that elements of the past and future are constantly insisting upon the present. The prose was a little flowery, but mostly vivid, extremely sensory.

• ---

  Monday, 27 May 2024 10:29 pm

  Dhalgren

  by Samuel R. Delany

  Published 1975 836 pages

  

  Last year, I read 35 books. This made me very pleased with myself, and I set a goal of reading a further 35 this year. Underpromise, overdeliver. I will probably finish 40 books in 2024, but let's not tell anyone about it, I thought. That way, it will seem impressive when I do.

  It is now nearly June and I have finished two (2) books. The first one was Trilogy by Jon Fosse. The second one, as of today, is Dhalgren, by Samuel R. Delany.

  I didn't like Dhalgren one bit. Normally I'd have a list of complaints and I wouldn't know where to start, but Dhalgren is frustratingly empty for a thousand pages. Nothing much happens: a blank-ish protagonist made up almost entirely of flimsy signifiers (e.g. only ever wearing a single shoe, donning a mysterious chain made up of prisms, going only as "Kid") bounces back and forth between a handful of setpieces in a postapocalyptic city, has sex with minors, and then describes in intimate detail where everyone's hands are. He publishes a book of poetry (which poetry is, significantly, omitted from the novel—but what it signifies is purposely left unclear) and then goes to the launch party for that book of poetry; this is the climax of the novel. Then he bounces back and forth between those setpieces a bit more, has more sex with minors, and then continues to describe what everyone is doing with their hands. Then the book ends.

  A lot of people really like this book. A lot of people, but fewer, I think, really dislike this book. I really disliked it. It took me about 20 hours to get through, but at no point did it compel me to pick it back up and turn pages. There are fun ideas here, even if they don't really go anywhere—but there are maybe 60 pages' worth, not a thousand.

  If you are not into this book by the time Kid arrives at the commune in the park, then it's not likely that you will ever be into it. Please abandon the book and reclaim the next six months of your life.

• ---

  Wednesday, 3 Jan 2024 8:59 pm

  Trilogy

  by Jon Fosse

  Published 2014 147 pages

  

  A trio of novellas following a man and woman called Asle and Alida as they try to find a corner of the world to live in. The book is rich in allusions but doesn't club you over the head with it; though I've never been to Norway, the writing feels typically Scandinavian to me: spare, naturalistic, levelheaded, a little bit poetic.

  Fosse's formal approach leans heavily on long run-on sentences and minimal dialogue, giving a sort of rambling vocal style to the text. It didn't resonate with me at first but I got into it after a little while. I'm not sure how much I'd enjoy reading more than a couple hundred pages of it, however: page after page of run-on sentence obliterated any sense of pacing for me. Not a problem here, but if I were sitting down to, say, seven full-length novels of this I might give up.

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