Tildes Book Club Discussion - Kindred by Octavia Butler
This is the eighth of an ongoing series of book discussions here on Tildes. We are discussing Kindred by Octavia Butler. Our next book will be The City We Became by Jemisen the first week of December.
I don't have a particular format in mind for this discussion, but I will post some prompts and questions as comments to get things started. You're not obligated to respond to them or vote on them though. So feel free to make your own top-level comment for whatever you wish to discuss, questions you have of others, or even just to post a review of the book you have written yourself.
For latecomers, don't worry if you didn't read the book in time for this Discussion topic. You can always join in once you finish it. Tildes Activity sort, and "Collapse old comments" feature should keep the topic going for as long as people are still replying.
And for anyone uninterested in this topic please use the Ignore Topic feature on this so it doesn't keep popping up in your Activity sort, since it's likely to keep doing that while I set this discussion up, and once people start joining in.
This novel is a masterpiece. There's not a single dull moment; I was completely invested from beginning to end. After the premise is set up, the major character arcs go how you'd expect, with few major surprises. However, this does not diminish the tension; instead, there is a pervasive, dreadful sense of inevitability.
I found it very easy to relate to the main character. While she repeatedly makes decisions that forseeably get her into deeper trouble, in context she makes them for understandable reasons (usually empathy). We'd all like to think that we're too strong, smart, or wilful to ever be slaves; surely we'd fight back! Yet our strong, smart, wilful main character's journey impels the reader to understand how a victim of abuse and injustice can 'let it happen'. The time travel was an effective in enhancing relatability: the point-of-view character is a modern-day person (and thinks like one), selling the idea that the victims of slavery are not intrinsically different from, or weaker than, the rest of us.
While this novel was written in the 1970s, the writing style does not feel at all dated. Certainly the themes are relevant today, and may remain so for as long as humans exist. The novel has no difficulty eliciting horror, outrage, and a sense of injustice; alongside moments of humanity, compassion, and hope.
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So I jumped the gun and read Kindred back in August -- partly due to me misreading the schedule, and partly because I was excited to start. So please forgive me if I'm a little foggy on some details.
I thought Kindred was very good. Not in any earthshaking, blow me away, "have to tell everyone about this book" sense, but just in the way that it felt real, believable, and well-told. Despite being classified as scifi, this book felt very grounded to me.
In truth, it also left me feeling a little somber. Not that I would begrudge it for that. It was just a hard read at times, as it was meant to be.
One of the first things I had to realize is that Dana isn't a modern woman exactly as I'd recognize her today. She's a modern woman in the '70s, when this book was first written. The difference of 50 years may not seem much compared to the 160 years that Dana travels, but it was enough to force me to reset my assumptions.
Dana is no stranger to racism. She was raised in Los Angeles and would've experienced the Watts Riots of 1960s, just ten years before the story takes place. And while Kevin was shocked at the judgemental response they received to their interracial marriage, it came as no surprise to her. It was just the world she grew up in.
All this is to say that Dana was already a hardened and adaptable character when she was first transported to the early 1800s. It was a completely different world, yes, but it was familiar in that she already understood its inequality. Once she gets over her initial confusion, she immediately recognizes the danger she is in and learns how to blend in.
This story uses a lot of contrast to illustrate its points. Kevin is in contrast to Dana, both in race and in experience. The 1970s are in contrast to the 1820s, and the framing narrative occasionally takes us back to remind us of that. And of course, the living conditions of the slave owners are starkly contrasted to that of the enslaved.
Rufus, as a character, is one that's a little harder to define for me. At times, the story almost wants us to feel bad for him. He's often sick, beaten up, or in some other kind of trouble. We see Dana feel for him and come to care about him. This makes it all the harder when he grows into a monster of a person, willing to rape, beat, and separate families.
Partly I feel this is commentary on the difficulty of overcoming one's society and upbringing. It was "just the way things were", and certainly the way his father raised him. Dana and Kevin's teachings just couldn't overcome that momentum. But I don't think it's that simple, either. Butler often emphasized that Rufus chose to do terrible things when it suited him. He found justifications, and shut down or lashed out when confronted with his behaviour. So while he may be a product of his environment, he is not an innocent victim. He had agency and still made decisions. I did not mourn when he met his end.
I feel that Kindred is an important book. It offered me the kind of perspective I could never get through lived experience. I feel bad that I can only truly begin to understand through entirely fictional accounts, but I appreciate reading it all the same. I think it was a great pick for our book club, and I hope others found it valuable too.
What did you think about the characters? Who was noteworthy or surprising? Who did you relate to?
What do you think about how time travel was handled in the book?
I liked the way that time travel was a mechanism that was used to tell a story, and we don't get any explanation of why it happens or what causes it, and just the barest bit of how it works that's enough for her to navigate the transitions. It lets the more important parts of the story come to the fore.
There are times when I want a detailed exposition / worldbuilding of the physics of star travel or magical system. But I think anything like that would just weaken this story. Instead, it has a timeless element to it.
It reminds me of The Time Traveler's Wife by Audrey Niffenegger which treats time travel similarly. The way paradoxes are dealt with in TTW would also work for Kindred, so in my head canon they are the same.
Contrast that with something like The Rise and Fall of Dodo by Neal Stephenson and Nicole Galland, where the elucidation of the method of time travel is almost the whole story to the point where it eclipses most of the ideas that could be interesting about the times visited and the people encountered.
While we are comparing time travel stories, I feel like I should also mention Connie Willis' The Doomsday Book. Though there's a second, modern day storyline in TDB, the past stories have a lot of similarities: using a modern viewpoint to encounter a tragedy in the past, the modern person's struggle to adapt to the realities of the past, even the use of modern understanding to help people in the past.
Of the three other books mentioned, I highly recommend The Time Traveler's Wife and The Doomsday Book.
Did you learn new things about slavery in the US? Is there anything about how slavery was shown that you disagree with?
Were you surprised by anything you saw in the book or how you reacted to any aspect of the story?
I think because we know almost from the beginning that Rufus and Alice were Dana's ancestors, I expected the story to be how Dana's influence caused Rufus to attain a more enlightened point of view, and for his childhood relationship with Alice to blossom into something loving and atypical. In my head, Dana would make it back to the present and go research him and find out she had created some beacon of hope.
Needless to say, what actually happened was quite a surprise to me. But I think it is was the story that needed to be told. Something that shows the real brutality and dehumanizing nature of slavery.
What questions do you want to ask the group about this story?
What reactions or thoughts do you want to share based on reading this book?