Kindred by Octavia Butler – Galley Beggar Critical Reading Class #2

It was our second session at the Galley Beggars Critical Reading Class moving from contemporary Belfast in Wendy Erskine’s The Benefactors to a modern classic of timeslip fiction, Kindred by Octavia Butler. We started off with Chief Galley Beggar Sam Jordison giving us some biographical background on Butler and about the drafting of the novel before opening up to discuss the novel in detail.

Octavia Butler was born in Pasadena, California in 1947. Her father was a shoeshine man, and her mother a housemaid. She hated that her mother had to go in to work through the back door vowing never to have to do the same, and started writing when given a typewriter for her 10th birthday. She became an avid reader of SF and discovered there were few if any black people in SF and determined to remedy that.

Kindred, her fourth novel, is the story of a young black woman, Dana, married to Kevin. She has the family bible with all her ancestors in going back into the 1800s, and one day as they move into their new house she is transported through time back to Maryland in 1815 where she saves a young white boy from drowning. However, the boy’s parents, plantation owners with many slaves, are suspicious of a black woman in trousers, and realising the situation she’s in, she’s drawn back to the present where she’s only been gone for seconds. Soon it happens again – a boy has set his curtains alight, and is in danger. She extinguishes the flames saving him, thinking she recognises him although he’s a few years older. Asking his name he answers Rufus, and tells her the date. Astounded, she asks if he knows a girl called Alice, and he says she is his friend. About to receive a beating, Dana is returned to the present, having been gone for minutes this time. Kevin can’t comprehend what’s happening, but Dana seems to accept now that it’s her role to protect Rufus from death, so he and Alice can father her ancestor… I shall say no more.

Most of the group enjoyed Butler’s storytelling, although it was generally felt that the book was slanted towards a YA audience (although that categorisation didn’t exist back in 1979 when Kindred was published), a topic I’ll return to below.

From hereon in, things will get slightly spoilery, be warned.

Butler has said she got the idea for Kindred from a classmate, and wrote the book during 1977-8. As Sam pointed out, in 1976, Alex Haley published Roots, and the landmark TV series was on screens as she was writing Kindred. Surely that must have influenced her – indeed one of the group was sure she references Kunta (Kinte) – the main character in Roots – in the book. Butler also said that she intentionally wrote the story for a wide audience including teens, she hoped the book would be stocked in school libraries and reach young adult readers, for whom, it may be their first read about historic slavery in the USA. She also deliberately chose to set the book’s present in the year of the USA’s bicentennial, 1976.

Both Dana and Kevin are writers, working temporary jobs (via ‘a casual labor agency – we regulars called it slave labor.’), at a warehouse where they met – to make ends meet while trying to get their writing careers going. Originally Kevin was going to be black, but making him white adds a whole new layer to the narrative which works far better when he is taken back in time with Dana. However, we don’t discover his ethnicity until a few chapters in which gives a clever delay in its revealing. While Kevin does his best to be understanding, there are occasions in the present when he displays a chauvinism that dismayed, such as when he tries to get Dana to type his manuscript. On the whole he was a bit underdeveloped as a character, as was the whole present day – although that was probably deliberate – readers will know the present, but not necessarily the past.

This brings me to the time travel element of the story. Butler described her story as a ‘grim fantasy’ – not SF or spec fiction. She offers no mechanism or dodgy physics for the time travel – it just happens, which was fine by me. There’s no need to discuss the time travel paradox – for you can’t change history, which arguably Dana and Kevin don’t attempt to do: if Rufus had been left to die, Dana’s ancestors wouldn’t have existed.

Butler thrusts us into it right from the start in the prologue, in events which happen at the end of the novel in which Dana is returning from the 1800s, but her arm is torn off in the transit. Symbolic but grim indeed. Originally, Butler planned an ending in which she didn’t get maimed in this way, however, that would have led to a longer book perhaps? As it is, it felt to us as if she didn’t know how to end it, and this, combined with a cheesy all too easy epilogue felt clunky.

It was a great discussion, and I was brave enough to air a view comparing Kindred with Fledgling, the only other Butler novel I’ve read. Fledgling, her last novel, is the coming of age story of a genetically engineered vampire who must live in symbiosis with a human – giving a novel master/slave take.

I devoured this novel, really enjoying Butler’s storytelling as we are propelled through Dana’s trials with little pause to breathe. I didn’t mind its YA-ness at all. See also Eleanor’s enthusiastic review from a few years ago.

Next month – The Country Girls by Edna O’Brien.

Source: Own copy. Kindred – 1979, Headline paperback, 295 pages. BUY at Waterstones via my affiliate link.