Doomsday reading

First, a correction of my earlier comments about the ending of Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow. While not exactly a happy ending, it was not an altogether sad ending. I would describe that book’s ending as “fitting.” 

Full disclosure - I had not quite finished the book when I was writing about it. I counted my chickens when they hadn’t yet hatched. 

*****

Right after I finished T and T and T, I read Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five, which I had never read before. And then I started on Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower, which I’m still reading, but almost finished. 

Both of these are great novels, the former a classic that is part of almost every literature curriculum (I have no idea why I never read it before last week) and the latter a newer classic published in the 90s that has gained a wide readership thanks to the internet. It was a critical mass book for me; one of those that enough people whose opinions I trust have mentioned as worthwhile that I finally started reading it. 

Aside from being great novels, these books are both grim and even terrifying (especially Parable). Slaughterhouse Five is about the bombing of Dresden and its lifelong impact on an American POW who survived because he was held in an underground slaughterhouse. Parable of the Sower is about the total breakdown of civilization and depicts a dystopian future United States in the years 2024 and beyond. As the story begins, the first-person narrator, Lauren Olamina, is a teenager living with her family in a relatively secure walled community surrounded by chaos and extreme poverty and even more extreme violence. You know within a few pages that the chaos and violence are going to penetrate the walls and that the Olaminas and their neighbors' situation, already precarious, is going to deteriorate. And - spoiler alert! -  it does. People do everything that people can do to other people when there are no social structures and no consequences; and Lauren’s fear is compounded by a hyperempathy disorder that causes her to feel others’ pain when she sees it. And she sees a lot of pain. 

You might wonder why I am even doing this to myself, and you would not be alone in asking this question. Why am I doing this to myself? And why are Kurt Vonnegut and Octavia Butler doing this to me? That last question is easy to answer, actually. Both of them just wrote about the truth as they understood it. Kurt Vonnegut actually did survive the bombing of Dresden; Slaughterhouse Five's protagonist, Billy Pilgrim, is a fictionalized version of Vonnegut himself. And although Octavia Butler didn’t experience a post-apocalyptic Los Angeles hellscape, it’s not hard to imagine that in such a scenario, the rich would remorselessly exploit the poor and that the strong would relentlessly abuse the weak and that people would rape and torture and kill for any reason or for no reason at all. Octavia Butler might not have seen or experienced the things she writes about in Parable (God I hope she didn’t) but she didn’t make this stuff up, either. It happens all the time. 

Books aren’t always supposed to be easy, for either writers or readers. Fiction can’t always be a pleasant escape, even when it’s page-turningly compelling, which Parable of the Sower certainly is. Reading about suffering and atrocity feels like facing it a little bit, like not turning my back on all of the actual real people who have endured such things. That’s why I do this to myself. 

*****

All the same, though, I do hope that Lauren Olamina and her band of refugees will wind up safe and prosperous on Bankole’s farm. I’m near the end of the book, and I’m almost afraid to find out.