This is my first review since August 2018.
Do I even know how to write a book review anymore? Did I ever?
I’m pretty sure my last review of a novel by Octavia E. Butler was mostly a love note anyway. It should be no surprise that this one will be the same.
Before we teleport into another timeline to discuss the dystopian, soul-shuddering, mind-fuck that is Lilith’s Brood, I want to start on the last page of the novel. There’s a small box about the author that inspired some intense feelings for me:
I’m in awe of the trail this woman has blazed, proud of her blackness and activism, sad that she is no longer physically on this earth, and determined to live and write in a way that’s at least as vaguely impactful as she has. If I remember my old book review format properly (I don’t), I’m supposed to save my rating for the end. The absolute reverence and adoration I feel for this author and this story outweighs my self-control: Five Stars.
It wouldn’t be a Writer Who Reads review without me ashamedly revealing the excessive amount of time I took to read this novel. But I have excuses! On top of my super demanding job and somewhat social life, Butler’s Lilith’s Brood is a compilation of three separate stories: Dawn, Adulthood Rites, Imago. At 749 pages, it’s practically three books in one.
See, great with excuses.
The three volumes were published separately between 1987 – 1989 and ultimately collected in a now out-of-print volume called Xenogenesis. In 2000, the trilogy was similarly compiled into the Lilith’s Brood collection currently in print.
Reading these “weird” titles, you must’ve guessed that this is a science fiction novel. Of course! It’s what Butler does and does spectacularly well. The cover of my copy, tattered and beaten, reads: Multiple Award-Winning Author of Kindred and Fledgling.
Multiple Award-Winning.
Okay, I’ll stop flexing for Ms. Butler. You get it.
This novel was a journey. Like most dystopian novels, it’s uncomfortable. It’s tragedy and unimaginable circumstances happening to humans just like us. It’s a cautionary tale, an alert, a call out. This is what happens when humans fuck up. So stop fucking up.
Where Margaret Atwood’s Handmaid’s Tale is a dystopian story rooted in realism, Butler’s Lilith’s Brood is dystopian in unthinkably distressing, supernatural ways.
I don’t mean supernatural as in magic powers or spirits. The most soul-shuddering thing about the supernaturality of Butler’s world is the plausibility. She truly injects the science in science fiction, conveys it so thoroughly and simply and logically that you’ll spend hours educating your friends about the anatomy of an alien species. Share it as fact.
Holy hell, Butler.
Once again I struggle to intrigue my audience with a thorough synopsis without including spoilers, but here we go. Broadly, the world ends due to war. We’ve heard this story before; we’ve almost lived it a few times. If it happens tomorrow we won’t be surprised.
Perhaps that’s why the story starts after the war—after our worst fears finally come to be. Butler allows her reader to fill in most of those blanks, which in itself is a lesson. See how easily you can imagine the end of the world? Stop it with the wars.
We start with Dawn and meet Lilith, my favorite character. She’s tall, black, beautiful. She’s guarded and responsible, cautious and open, independent but yielding. I want to call her mother or sister. She’s black femininity in all the ways I’d like to express it. If I knew her in real life, I’d be desperate for her approval.
So Lilith wakes, disoriented, on an alien spaceship. She remembers the war, her family, her losses, but not how she got to the ship. At first she doesn’t even know if she’s really on a ship. Eventually, slowly, the aliens reveal themselves, their wants, their nature and values.
That’s really all I can share without spoiling anything.
Adulthood Rites follows a character named Akin, whose background I will not reveal.
Imago follows Jodahs, a character I relate to in disturbingly specific ways. Queer ways.
Both Dawn and Adulthood Rites were written in third person; Imago in first person. I speculate that this was done intentionally. Perhaps Butler needed the freedom that the third person perspective allows in the first two stories to flesh out the new world being created. Perhaps our first-person character Jodahs’ transformation called for a more intimate perspective. Or maybe Butler was just tired of writing in the third-person.
While we’re talking about writing, let’s dive into a few of the things that made my mouth water while reading. Normally I mark up my books with tons of hearts to indicate exceptionally written lines. However I always seemed to be moving while reading this: on a subway in NYC, a plane to New Orleans, a rooftop pool in New Orleans where a woman screamed, “You’re reading Lilith’s Brood! I love you!” Or a plane to London, a cafe in London. Yes, it has been a journey. A journey without a pen.
I’m unable to identify one thing I love most about Butler’s writing, but I’ll focus on the graceful balance of it all. Butler never over-writes or rushes to cram everything in at once. The story unfolds, compounds, builds into a rich world that we fully understand because she’s not using big complex words or explanations. See this simplistic explanation of Lilith’s fear as she comes into contact with something otherworldly:
“She did not want to be any closer to him. She had not known what held her back before. Now she was certain it was his alienness, his difference, his literal unearthliness.”
Lilith’s Brood, p13
Other things Butler does well: juggles a ton of characters, building them through action and always keeping the story moving. Nothing is superfluous. No character is poorly thought out. Each has their own distinct voice. And the dialogue! I have to talk about the dialogue.
The story is tense, of course. Butler expresses this tension, vulnerability, rage, sadness, conflict, recalibration, and more through her dialogue alone. Characters say things and we understand the weight and true meaning without being told. As seen in Adulthood Rites:
“Give him to me,” Galt said. “I’ll make him talk.”
“He’ll talk when he gets ready,” Iriarte said. “Hell, I had seven kids before the war. They’d talk all the time until you wanted them to.”
“Listen, I’m not talking about baby talk!”
“I know. I believe you. Why does it bother you so?”
Lilith’s Brood, p341
There are barely any dialogue tags or text outside of the dialogue here, but clear emotion, tension, and significant characterization.
Okay, I’ve been patient. Can we talk about sex now?
When I mentioned talking to my friends about alien anatomy, you had to know I meant sex. I meant that I needed to talk to someone—in this example, my podcast co-host, Trapper—about alien sex.
And, honestly, all I did was confuse him and myself. I look forward to confusing you as well, as I try to explain how and why I’m enraptured with the way Butler expresses something that is pleasurable, sexual in nature, but maybe not always sex?
I don’t know! I don’t know! I love it.
Avoiding spoilers, please read and appreciate this short and breathtaking interaction between nameless individuals:
Now their delight in one another ignited and burned. They moved together, sustaining an impossible intensity, both of them tireless, perfectly matched, ablaze in sensation, lost in one another. They seemed to rush upward. A long time later, they seemed to drift down slowly, gradually, savouring a few more moments wholly together.
Lilith’s Brood, p162
And this excerpt from Imago:
“… the rhythm of her heartbeat, the rush of her blood, the texture of her flesh, the easy, right, life-sustaining working of her organs, her cells, the smallest organelles within her cells—all this was a vast, infinitely absorbing complexity.”
Lilith’s Brood, p678
The intimacy Butler explains in numerous skillful ways is not sex as we understand it, but it is pleasure. She used that word a lot: pleasure. It is elegant and transcending, attentive. I love how she writes these scenes. I love it and I don’t understand it fully. I don’t think I want to. How tantalizing. How grossly romantic.
As this review comes to an end, I feel compelled to speculate on the overall theme. Butler built a whole species, an entire reality and potential future.
Why did she do it?
There’s something referred to as the Human Contradiction in the novel, which is the unspoken but thoroughly felt tension between impressive human intelligence and the innate deceit, jealousy, and deception that we cannot seem to shake.
If Butler simply wanted to point that out, she succeeded. Although I go back and forth on whether she’s making a helpless observation or calling on the human species to change, to improve.
In the end, I’m glad to say that I have a lot more Octavia E. Butler fiction to read. Butler seems to honor her connection with the story and the reader above any rules, natural or otherwise. It’s this attention to detail, this obvious passion, that has fully pleased me.
Again, Five Stars.
