It’s really hard to describe how good this book is — but I’m going to try.
Parable of the Sower is told from the first-person perspective of Lauren, a young woman growing to adulthood in the socially, economically, and morally bankrupt United States of America in the not-too-distant future. (I say “not-too-distant”: the story begins in 2024).
The government has all but collapsed, law and order has failed (the police are charging a “fee” to come out and investigate murders; they take the money — and then fail to show up). The addict’s choice narcotic is Pyro: a drug that gives folk an unquenchable desire to commit arson). Theft, murder, and rape run pretty much unchecked, which is unsurprising because much of the crime is being carried out by rogue police forces across the land.
So back to Lauren.
Lauren lives in a small community headed by her pastor father and step mother. Like most communities, they follow a basic set of rules:
- Protect what’s yours.
- Post watches to guard your community at night.
- Don’t interact with the police if you can possibly help it.
- Learn to shoot, and learn to shoot accurately.
The last one is especially problematic for Lauren; as an empath (a condition brought about due to her birth mother’s drug problem), she feels the pain and suffering of others.
Inevitably, Lauren’s less-than-comfortable existence comes to a sudden and violent end when her community is torched, and her family and friends are slaughtered.
And so Lauren and a handful of survivors begin the dangerous trek north, where they hope to find sanctuary in Canada.
Wow.
This book really does have it all: suspense, emotion, characters, fantastically sparse dialogue, the occasional laugh, and plenty of sorrow. The author doesn’t spare any character from her attention to detail, and so you can’t help but get caught up in Lauren’s grief when the character disappears.
The sense of place, is expertly done (Butler obviously knows the US very well), and extremely bleak. It’s graphically deep, but not at all overdone. Dogs wandering about with baby’s limbs in their jaws, maybe a tough read, but it all adds to the sense of realism: pets reverting to wild animals in the space of a single generation is exactly what would happen when a country like America approaches collapse.
Their journey progresses northward, and the situation throughout the country becomes more desperate. The nation is sinking into anarchy, the population is becoming poorer (and looking to blame other, darker-skinned poor people as the cause of their problems); meanwhile, the government enacts laws designed to bring back slavery.
And Lauren carries on, walking and writing notes her thoughts on spiritualism as a possible blueprint for a new community in the north.
As I may have eluded to, this is the best book I’ve read this year (true, we’re not very far into it); it’s going to take some beating. Aside from the undeniable quality of the writing, Butler has given us something that, unfortunately, points to a future that’s starting right now.