Parable of the Sower, by Octavia Butler

I loved this book! Which was a surprise. Based on the first few chapters, I expected to read it slowly and wincingly over the course of months, and I'd probably have put off even starting it if it had been described to me in advance: it's set in a near future America (2024) which could be called post-apocalyptic if its apocalypse showed any signs of slowing down, where climate change is eating the coast, fire trucks come only to homes that can pay for the water, every child has grown up seeing corpses, fortunate neighborhoods are those with walls around them, and walking outside without a gun is likely to result in being raped and/or murdered. This is a genre niche I tend to avoid. Parable of the Sower was written in the nineties, and I wish, as a prediction, it had aged worse.

But this is one of the grimmer books which I'd call heartwarming, and in fact I read it over two days. I wouldn't hand the book to someone saying, "Here, a heartwarming book"; tragedies are its substrate. But it's carried by its human details, and also by its general attitude to humans. People trust each other, perhaps unwisely, and improve their situations as a result. Much of the trust that occurs follows from people wanting to help small children, even when they think they probably shouldn't. Competence might save you, and a large part of competence is being willing to listen. Every cry for help might be a trap, but most of them aren't. Survival means being fortified against thieves, or it means being a thief, and in either case it means not helping everyone who needs your help, but that doesn't mean you don't do what you can.

The book's narrator, Lauren, is impressively competent. She is a sharer, someone who experiences psychosomatically any pain or pleasure she sees anyone feeling; in her situation this is a vulnerability she's always concealed, and a reason to learn to kill efficiently when she has to. She starts the book ruthless, and becomes less so. She has also spent her life discovering and learning to express her own religion, a religion she hopes to go out into the world and establish somewhere her father's Christianity in which God is Change, and the art of living in the world is readiness to respond to and shape God. She's fifteen when the book begins, and early on there's a scene where she's urging her father to understand that the safe walled neighbourhood he's helped build isn't safe at all, that everyone who's trying to ignore the instability of their situation needs to wake up stat. I can easily imagine a version of this scene where Lauren's father is simply blinkered, and his daughter's defiance is simply right in the way that the defiance of young adults in young adult fiction is usually right. But in fact what her father tells her is that the adults of the community have been balancing on the edge of the abyss Lauren's just looked into for more years than she's been alive, and that he's been doing the best he can to prepare them -- slowly, surely, avoiding panic. He misjudges her, and she's at least as correct as he is, but she's also misjudged him; he takes some of her advice, and then trusts her with a few more of his plans for dealing with disaster. Nobody in the book is always right or always wrong: when Lauren faces a disaster and has to make use of the plans she's put in place, she immediately discovers ways in which they're deficient, at the same time as they do allow her to survive.

I'm not sure how I feel about how much of the trouble the characters and their communities run into is catalysed by a particular pyromaniac drug movement. We're never given a character from that movement to understand. On the one hand, such organised nihilism doesn't seem to need extra explanation, it seems perfectly plausible; on the other, unfocused human desperation would also feel sufficient to me as a cause for everything that goes wrong. I don't feel as though the main characters in this book couldn't have been pushed to do worse things than they did: they are as moral as they can be, and their morality contributes a lot to their success, but there's a lot of luck allowing that too, which I think is why I feel odd about having so many of the people who are most dangerous being 'them over there who shave their heads and paint their faces.' My thoughts on this may change with the sequel, which I'd be reading right now if Arty Bees had had it when I checked.

Probably more dead bodies are glimpsed in this book than it has major characters. Still and all, my heart was warmed.