Fledgling by Octavia E. Butler
317 pages
Published 2005
Read from August 28 to September 4
Rating: ★★ out of 5
Having favorite authors is risky. If you dig too greedily and too deep into any writer's output, you're bound to get disappointed, even disillusioned.
I haven't loved all of Butler's books until now. The Parable series was excellent; I loved Kindred and Wild Seed; Clay's Ark was solidly enjoyable. The rest of the Patternist series, however, was only mediocre. None of that prepared me for how thoroughly let down I'd be by Fledgling.
"Butler herself passed Fledgling off as a lark," says Wikipedia, and it shows. The writing is as lifeless as anything I might put down in the final third of a novel, when I'm impatient to get the story beats down and move on. But whereas I justify my mediocrity with the excuse that it's merely a first draft, Fledgling is the final published novel of one of the acknowledged luminaries of 20th century fiction. After an attack on a vampire compound, the prose moves with the urgency of a dead snail: "I ran to the garage, lifted one of the doors, and glanced toward the side of the house, where I hoped Wright, Celia, and Brook were paying attention.... I opened the other garage door and waited until they were all in the cars. Then I got in and we fled. We fled slowly." I wouldn't accept writing like that from some unpublished nobody (such as myself), let alone someone I'd idolized.
The story itself is just... odd. One thing I've noticed in Butler's works is a predilection to pair young heroines with significantly older men. In Parable of the Sower, Olamina, barely 18, bonds with Bankole, a doctor in his 60s. In Wild Seed, Anyanwu is hundreds of years old, but gets entwined with Doro, who is thousands of years old, and usually assumes the form of a young woman for his enjoyment. In Kindred, Kevin is only a few years older than Dana, but he's prematurely gray, and through a mishap of time travel ends up several additional years older by the midpoint of the novel. Fledgling follows a, well, fledgling vampire who looks like a 10 or 11 year old human girl; the instant sexual attraction seemingly every human feels for her is explained as a facet of vampire biology, but as far as I can see, Shori's age fits no essential thematic purpose -- it's just a detail that gets referenced again and again as she gets picked up into adult humans' laps seemingly every chapter.
Look, authors: It's fine to have your sexual kinks. Just don't shove them into every novel. That's Heinlein territory. Don't go there.
Fledgling's themes of miscegenation and racist attitudes are interesting, and Butler's attempt to craft a "scientific" version of vampire biology is, at least in the abstract, commendable. But the story suffers from too much worldbuilding. Shori awakens in the first chapter with zero memory of herself or her species -- amnesia rarely, if ever, proves a good storytelling device, and here it serves as an excuse to info-dump all the anthropological details Butler invents for the Ina. Shori's quest to relearn the knowledge she lost about vampires and their biology derails what little momentum the clunky prose produces, with Shori going off on tangents even during the supposedly climactic chapters of the Council trial.
Ugh. Between this and Wicked, which I abandoned after four days and fifteen pages, TV is beginning to look a lot more interesting as a hobby. I need to get into a good book, and quick.
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