Book Review: "Parable of the Talents" by Octavia Butler

 

4/5 stars

*Spoiler alert!*

It took me a while to gather my thoughts on the second and final volume of the Earthseed duology by Octavia Butler. Parable of the Talents was both extremely heartbreaking and extremely full of hope.

At the end of the first book, Parable of the Sower, Lauren Olamina and her found family have established the first of the Earthseed communities in the mountains of California. Named Acorn, Lauren sees it as the first of many to help jolt humanity out of its doldrums and spread to the stars. Readers are introduced to the voice of Lauren’s child, Larkin, who tells what happens next in her mother’s story from far in the future through Lauren’s extensive journal archives.

“I have also read that the Pox was caused by accidentally coinciding climatic, economic, and sociological crises. It would be more honest to say that the Pox was caused by our own refusal to deal with obvious problems in those areas. We caused the problems: then we sat and watched as they grew into crises.”

However, even while the crises that nearly destroyed America are easing—collectively known as the Pox, as in “pox on your house”—a new, yet familiar force is rising. A reactionary religious movement known as Christian America, whose figurehead sounds like a nasty cross between Donald Trump and Donald Pence, is on the rise.

Hailing from Texas, Andrew Steele Jarret believes in Making America Find Religion Again (forcefully). His Crusaders violently take over Acorn and send its residents fleeing. Now Camp Christian, Acorn’s former residents have been rounded up and collared, i.e., turned into slaves. Their children, including Larkin, have been “adopted” by Christian American families. It seems that the Earthseed movement has ground to a halt and humanity is reverting to acting on their fears through violence, while still ignoring the festering wounds of systemic problems not being properly dealt with.

“This was something new. Or something old. I didn’t think of what it might be until after I had let Aubrey go back to the clinic to bed down next to her child. Bankole had given him something to help him sleep. He did the same for her, so I won’t be able to ask her anything more until she wakes up later this morning. I couldn’t help wondering, though, whether these people, with their crosses, had some connection with my current least favorite presidential candidate, Texas Senator Andrew Steele Jarret. It sounds like the sort of thing his people might do—a revival of something nasty out of the past. Did the Ku Klux Klan wear crosses—as well as burn them? The Nazis wore the swastika, which is a kind of cross, but I don’t think they wore it on their chests. There were crosses all over the place during the Inquisition and before that, during the Crusades. So now we have another group that uses crosses and slaughters people. Jarret’s people could be behind it. Jarret insists on being a throwback to some earlier, “simpler” time. Now does not suit him. Religious tolerance does not suit him. The current state of the country does not suit him. He wants to take us all back to some magical time when everyone believed in the same God, worshipped him in the same way, and understood that their safety in the universe depended on completing the same religious rituals and stomping anyone who was different. There was never such a time in this country.

But these days when more than half the people in the country can’t read at all, history is just one more vast unknown to them. Jarret supporters have been known, now and then, to form mobs and burn people at the stake for being witches. Witches! In 2032! A witch, in their view, tends to be a Moslem, a Jew, a Hindu, a Buddhist, or, in some parts of the country, a Mormon, a Jehovah’s Witness, or even a Catholic. A witch may also be an atheist, a “cultist,” or a well-to-do eccentric. Well-to-do eccentrics often have no protectors or much that’s worth stealing. And “cultist” is a great catchall term for anyone who fits into no other large category, and yet doesn’t quite match Jarret’s version of Christianity. Jarret’s people have been known to beat or drive out Unitarians, for goodness’ sake. Jarret condemns the burnings, but does so in such mild language that his people are free to hear what they want to hear. As for the beatings, the tarring and feathering, and the destruction of “heathen houses of devil-worship,” he has a simple answer: “Join us! Our doors are open to every nationality, every race! Leave your sinful past behind, and become one of us. Help us to make America great again.”

This book was published in 1998, yet I feel like Butler was prophesizing Donald Trump and the MAGA movement. It just felt eerie reading about the rise of Jarret on a wave of reactionary right-wing fascism and religious extremism. While our America, in 2023, has not exactly fallen completely under a religious dictatorship, the alarms have been going on for years that this is where we could be headed if we don’t get our collective stuff together.

I have a feeling that I would be called hysterical for this entire review, just as Lauren Olamina was prior to the destruction of her childhood home of Robledo. It’s just that this speculative fiction duology has pointed out what can happen when the worst impulses of humanity are encouraged in a community, a state, a nation. And I don’t want that to happen to America.

In any case, Parable of the Talents was not only a political and social justice rollercoaster, but an emotional one as well.

Emotional in terms of the journey it takes for Lauren and her daughter, Larkin, to reunite but not quite reconnect as mother and daughter. Emotional as in the bonds Lauren develops with strangers and her Acorn family. Emotional as in the fracturing of the relationship between a lost-and-found-brother and his sister, both of them holding opposing faiths, despite both being the children of a preacher. Emotional as in this whole duology hit me very hard.

That even in the darkest of times, people still find a way to come together and make a change for the better.

I won’t pretend that Parable of the Sower and Parable of the Talents were easy reads. Far from it. But I think they are an important meditation on political movements, religion, and social justice.

Happy reading!

--BookOwl