50books_poc | 11. Octavia Butler

Octavia Butler is one of those authors I always meant to read but never got around to. This is the first book of hers that I've read, and it didn't disappoint. There is probably little new that I can say about an author who is so well-known, but humor me while I give my impressions anyway.

Kindred is the story of a black American woman, Dana, who finds herself mysteriously and unwantedly transported to another time and place -- antebellum Maryland. She quickly realizes that the reason for her time-traveling is her ancestor Rufus, a white boy who somehow involuntarily calls her to him whenever his life is in danger. Whenever Dana's own life is threatened, she, also involuntarily, returns to her own time.

There are a few rules -- each time she visits Rufus, he is years older, though little time has passed for her. She is able to bring things with her to the past by touching them, including her husband Kevin, who is white. The mechanism of the time travel is unimportant, and is never explained. We don't question why, for example, the carpet she's standing on doesn't travel with her! It's not that kind of a book.

This is not a Quantum Leap story, where she is supposed to make things better than they originally were; it's a Back to the Future story, where she must simply ensure that Rufus's child is born so that she in turn can live. There doesn't seem to be much danger, actually, of Dana not surviving, or at least I never thought it was likely. The real tension comes from wondering how Dana will cope with living as a slave in the months between her time traveling, and wondering just how much Rufus will grow up to be a product of his time.

Butler's writing style is clean and direct. She always comes straight to the point, sometimes to a fault. At the beginning she starts off so fast that I questioned whether Dana and Kevin would accept the reality of what was happening so easily. I was reminded of the movie Unbreakable, which is the most believable take I've seen on how people might really react to something profoundly supernatural -- and it takes the whole movie for the characters to accept it! Kindred is the polar opposite of that; Butler just wants to tell the story and not talk about the premise.

I tend to read authors who are more on the poetic side, so it took a bit for me to warm up to Butler's style. At first her descriptions seemed too distant and unvisceral. There is a lot of violence in this book, but coming off a recent read of Keri Hulme's physical and emotional bloodbath the bone people, Kindred seemed a bit on the tame side, which I am sure is the opposite of what Butler was going for.

But somewhere in the middle, my feelings changed. The book reached me. The real horror of Dana's experiences isn't in her body being beaten, but in her heart and mind adapting to being enslaved, in finding out just how far she can be pushed to collaborate with the system. It's a slippery slope she falls down -- who could blame her at first for going along with expectations just to stay alive? Who would do otherwise? Compare that beginning with the level of complicity she seriously considers by the end, and it's still hard to blame her, knowing how truly trapped she is. As I read the end my heart was racing with empathetic fear.

Though I empathized with Dana, she's a bit of an Everywoman, probably intentionally so. She seems like your average modern woman (if a little old-fashioned because the novel was written in the 1970s), easy to relate to, which makes it scarier.

Kevin, her husband, also has an intriguing journey, but much of it is only hinted at. I would have read a version of this novel that was twice as long and included his story in detail, the parallel story of what happens to a white man trapped in the past, how he adapts and is also warped by that adaptation. In that respect I was left wanting more, but I can understand why she didn't choose to focus equally on that character.

The characters in the past are drawn more vividly, and I think Butler captured the particular horribleness of whites who "weren't that bad". Of course some slaveowners were crueller than others, which is precisely what makes these slightly (slightly!) more easygoing people all the more dangerous. The slaves don't want to rock the boat for fear that they'll end up someplace even worse. Truly chilling. I like that Butler confronted this head-on, allowing Kevin to start in on the "they're not as bad as I imagined" line and to have that brought out in the open.

Overall, I liked it a lot. I look forward to reading Butler's other work.

tags: a: butler octavia, african-american, sf/fantasy