Kindred - Octavia E. Butler

Time travel takes many forms in fiction. There are time machines which allow you some control over your destination, whether they take the format of police telephone boxes or DeLoreans; Stephen King's time portal was the pantry of a diner which always sends you back to the same place and time, always setting the timeline back to how it was supposed to be (or does it...?) Then there is time travel that leaves you at its mercy, sending you here and there in space and time as it sees fit, as in The Time Traveller's Wife. Octavia Butler's time travel affects her protagonist, Dana, in this way. Except that she is a young black woman living in the nineteen seventies, and her time-travelling is tied into the life of Rufus Weylin, who is the son of a plantation owner in Maryland of the early nineteenth century. Dana's trips to the past are unpredictable and dangerous, and she finds herself having to make unthinkable compromises in order to survive that hostile time.

"You might be able to go through this whole experience as an observer," I said, "I can understand that because most of the time, I'm still an observer. It's protection. It's nineteen seventy-six shielding and cushioning eighteen nineteen for me. But now and then, like with the kids' game, I can't maintain the distance. I'm drawn all the way into eighteen nineteen, and I don't know what to do."

It was curious; although I am very familiar with time travel stories, it was while reading Kindred that I realised how different the past can be. Then was then, now is now, but through Dana's eyes I had a sense of the two eras existing simultaneously, like two pictures drawn on tracing paper and placed one over the other. And it is a very jarring experience. Most historical or time-travel fiction persuades me that people don't change, that they may hold different views but that people are basically the same wherever and whenever you go. This is probably because I approach these narratives from a white point of view. Seeing slavery first-hand from Dana's point of view, I found myself questioning this. What kind of human being could ever think slavery was okay?! Dana tries so hard to influence Rufus when she meets him as a boy, to question the values he learns from his father and the society around him, and for a while she seems to have a certain amount of success. But she meets him as a man, and he has accepted his world as it is. It broke my heart to think maybe it was a losing battle. There is only a limited amount of influence Dana can hold over him while living the life of a slave on his plantation. She can't shake sense into him - any overt attempts to persuade him that he's wrong would result in dire consequences for her.

"He wasn't a monster at all. Just an ordinary man who sometimes did the monstrous things his society said were legal and proper."

I wonder. From twenty-first century England I'd shout YOU KNOW BETTER, RUFUS! IN YOUR HEART, YOU KNOW RIGHT FROM WRONG. At the same time, I found myself questioning myself. Are we born with a conscience, or do we learn it from our social context? Even at my most conservative and suggestible, I could never talk myself into accepting everything I was taught. I like to think that I would be a decent person even if I lived as a white middle-class person in the American South in the 1800s, but I wonder, and part of me is afraid to find out. I hope at a bare minimum I would hang onto the truth Terry Pratchett's witch Granny Weatherwax summarises as "Sin... is when you treat people as things."

In one of Dana's later visits (perhaps "summons" is a better word) to the past, her husband, who is white, comes along with her, and with much her disgust, she goes along with the pretence of being his slave. What shocked me was not so much her agreement to keep up this act, but the way that the life gets into her head. How even a strong, courageous, modern woman like Dana must submit and make compromises in order to survive, all the ways that one group of people will oppress and frighten another group in order to keep them where they want them. Maybe man's inhumanity to man is old news, but it does not stop being shocking. Octavia Butler takes the familiar narrative from history and brings it back to life, reminding the reader of the reality behind the fiction. And looking at the news the internet brings me every day, I fear that history is not as far in the past as people would like to believe. As such, Kindred is a Very Important Book. Go out and buy it.

Many thanks to Alley for encouraging me to think about diversity in my reading, and for your recommendations of Octavia Butler. I will certainly be looking out for more books by this author.

To Kill a Mockingbird, Harper Lee

Of all the novels I've read over my lifetime, there are several which I recommend to friends, a fair few that I am surprised if someone hasn't read, and just a handful that I think everybody must read! To Kill A Mockingbird is in the last category.

I first read To Kill a Mockingbird for one of my GCSE English modules. Correction: I read a playscript adaptation, which captured the gist of the novel while omitting a lot that didn't directly affect the main plot. Even at fourteen or so I resented the truncated version, just as I was grateful for being in the only class in the year group to actually study a novel (Lord of the Flies) instead of a few odd short stories in The Anthology: novels were harder work but the alternative felt like cheating. I wanted something I could really get my teeth into. (Looking back, it's clear I was destined to study English Literature.) Thinking about it now, though, it seems that by setting us To Kill a Mockingbird for the obligatory drama module, the exam board were slipping us another classic novel in disguise, and a couple of years later I read the book properly for the first time.

When Scout and Jem are given air rifles, their father, renowned lawyer Atticus Finch tells them:

"'I'd rather you shot at tin cans in the back yard, but I know you'll go after birds. Shoot all the bluejays you want, if you can hit 'em, but remember it's a sin to kill a mockingbird.'"

Scout recalls:

"That was the only time I ever heard Atticus say it was a sin to do something, and I asked Miss Maudie about it.

"'Your father's right,' she said. 'Mockingbirds don't do one thing but make music for us to enjoy. They don't eat up people's gardens, don't nest in corncribs, they don't do one thing but sing their hearts out for us. That's why it's a sin to kill a mockingbird.'"

But what has this to do with the main story, and why does the title come from this small conversation? The image comes up later on in a newspaper editorial on the main plot: the trial of a black man, Tom Robinson, accused of the rape of a white girl, Mayella Ewell. Atticus is given the job of defending Tom, and much to the townspeople's displeasure, is intent on defending him as well as he possibly can. It is obvious that Tom is innocent, but this is the Deep South in the 1930s, and there is simply no way a jury would favour a black man over a white.

The novel is told by Scout, or Jean Louise Finch as she is named on her birth certificate, who is six at the start and about nine when the story ends. To her innocent mind, it is painfully obvious how things should be, and we feel her bafflement at discovering the ignorance and hypocrisy of the adults involved in the case. Everyone despise the Ewell family, especially father Bob Ewell, a drunken, violent, cowardly layabout. The Ewells are seen as the lowest of the low, and Tom Robinson is a kind, church-going family man, whose only crime was to feel sorry for Mayella Ewell. It is so obvious. And yet. And still. They are white.

Throwing books across the room is usually reserved only for bad writing, but I was sorely tempted on this reading of To Kill a Mockingbird out of sheer emotion. I wanted to shake some sense into the people, all the people.

My sister was reading The Help by Kathryn Stockett at the same time I read To Kill a Mockingbird, and when discussing the books we both found ourselves wondering, in her words, "whether I would be so stupid and brainwashed if I'd lived back then. It seems like another world." Would we just accept the prejudices and injustices because That's Just The Way Things Are. In Atticus Finch we see someone who does not, who fights for justice and equality. In 2003, Atticus was voted as the greatest hero by the American Film Institute, against all the more "obvious," action characters out there. His heroism is summed up by his quote at the end of Part One:

"'[Courage is] when you know you're licked before you begin but you begin anyway and you see it through no matter what."

Atticus doesn't change Maycomb County overnight, but towards the end we start to see a few people acknowedging the injustices in the system and in their own nature, start to question the things they have previously accepted. Unexpected people show support for Atticus, when previously they criticised him, and speak out against the racism that infests the town. If only baby-steps, there is a little movement. People are starting to think.

I've never seen the film of the book, but by all accounts it lives up to the book and is worth watching. I intend to find myself a copy soon.