Guest review by Sarah LeFanu: KINDRED by Octavia E Butler

 

"Butler is acclaimed ... not just for her trail-blazing dual role as a Black woman writer of SF but for the way she embraced its rich literary and political possibilities."

Photograph: Lindsey Fiddler

Sarah LeFanu is a biographer whose subjects include Rose Macaulay, Samora Machel, Mary Kingsley, Rudyard Kipling and Arthur Conan Doyle. She has published two memoirs that focus on the process of biographical writing: Dreaming of Rose: A Biographer’s Journal and Talking to the Dead: Travels of a Biographer. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.

When in the early 1970s Octavia E. Butler was publishing her first short stories, the number of Black writers working in science fiction could be counted on the fingers of one hand. The number of women writers was not much higher. Butler is acclaimed now, however, not just for her trail-blazing dual role as a Black woman writer of SF but for the way she embraced its rich literary and political possibilities. Nowhere is this more apparent than in her dazzling, disturbing time travel novel Kindred.

Time travel has served as a significant science fictional trope since the publication in 1895 of The Time Machine, H. G. Wells’s frightening tale of class struggle and the end of times. Half a century later, SF writers such as Philip K Dick and Robert Heinlein were playing with the paradoxical consequences of time travel and exploring questions of causality, free will and determinism. In Kindred Butler uses a narrative of time travel to foreground political questions around race, sexuality and gender.

Kindred is a novel that confronts America’s history of slavery, and its legacy. It is concerned with the interrelationship of intimacy and oppression. Because it is about race and also about female sexuality, it necessarily explores the uses of violence and violent coercion.

A young Black writer called Dana (short for Edana) Franklin, married to Kevin, an older white writer and living with him in California in 1976, is suddenly and then repeatedly pulled back to the early 19th century to a plantation in Maryland, one of the slave states of the ante bellum South. She is being summoned back to the past, she discovers, in order to save the life of one of her ancestors and thus ensure her own future existence. Rufus Weylin, the man whose life she saves over and over, is a white man. He is the son of the owner of the plantation. During the course of the novel he inherits the plantation and all the enslaved people who live and work there, and fathers on Alice, initially a free woman but later a slave, the mixed-race child who will become Dana’s great-grandmother.

Octavia Estelle Butler was born in Pasadena, California in 1947, into a society that she saw at an early age was profoundly racially divided. As a small child she would accompany her mother to the houses where she worked as a housemaid: the quiet, observant girl noticed that white people employed Black servants, and that those Black servants always came and went by the back door. She found her wider world through books in the public library, and knew early on that she wanted, and needed, to write. She was inspired to write science fiction while watching, when she was about 12, the British B-movie Devil Girl from Mars. She had a ‘series of revelations’: first, ‘Geez, I can write a better story than that!’, then, ‘Anybody can write a better story than that!’, and the clincher: ‘Somebody got paid for writing that story!’

Unlike other aspirational Black girls of her generation who saw training as a teacher or a nurse as a path to autonomy, Butler bravely chose to work at casual labouring jobs that would give her the freedom to think and to write. She gives this same choice to Dana in Kindred. Dana describes her work and her writing life: ‘You swept floors, stuffed envelopes, took inventory, sorted potato chips (really!), cleaned toilets, marked prices on merchandise … I did the work, I went home, I ate, and then slept for a few hours. Finally, I got up and wrote.’ Butler found her way on to writing courses (including the famous Clarion Science Fiction Writers’ Workshop), where she met and was encouraged by two older science fiction writers, Harlan Ellison and Samuel R. Delany. In the novel, Dana is encouraged by her writer husband.

Butler’s first novel, Patternmaster, was published in 1976, which is the year in Kindred when America’s history of slavery erupts into Dana’s life, an experience that she will transform into a first-person account, a memoir. Dana is the portrait of a writer-in-training.

Kindred opens with an image of bodily trauma. ‘I lost an arm on my last trip home,’ writes Dana. This opening statement hardly prepares the reader for the harrowing accounts of violence that will follow as Dana spends increasing amounts of time on the plantation in Maryland. On her second visit she witnesses a man being whipped: ‘I had seen people beaten on television and in the movies. I had seen the too-red blood substitute streaked across their backs and heard their well-rehearsed screams. But I hadn’t lain nearby and smelled their sweat or heard them pleading and praying, shamed before their families and themselves.’ Black and female, Dana too becomes an object of the violence inflicted on slaves to keep them in line, even although she is not, herself, a slave. In the course of the novel she is beaten, punched, kicked in the face, whipped until she loses consciousness. She witnesses other forms of violence: sexual abuse, families broken up, children seized and sold to other slave owners. She comes to understand the power inherent in the threat of that violence. Her thoughts begin to whisper to her, ‘See how easily slaves are made?’

Dana’s journeys into the past raise questions about power and powerlessness, about the many forms oppression takes, and about the possibilities and the risks of resistance. Her close entanglement with Rufus the white slave owner – a life-and-death entanglement – affects not only her increasingly close relationships with the community of slaves and free Blacks on the plantation, but also casts its shadow into her present-day. ‘I began writing about power,’ Octavia Butler once explained, speaking of her whole oeuvre and not just this one novel, ‘because I had so little.’

In the best SF tradition, Kindred is a novel of ideas. It is simultaneously a powerfully moving story that interrogates the price paid by those struggling for freedom and agency. At the end, Dana’s own history is marked by the loss of her arm, but she has survived to write the story that is Kindred. A pioneer in science fiction in the 1970s and 1980s, since her death in 2006 Butler has been acclaimed for her role in gaining recognition for science fiction as literature, and she is now celebrated for being a foremother of Afrofuturism.

Kindred is published by Headline. The cover shown above is for Headline's special hardback edition.

Note: The Headline paperback claims, incorrectly, that Kindred was first published in the UK by them in 2014. In fact it was first published in the UK quite a bit earlier - in 1988, by The Women’s Press, as part of their SF series. (I was an editor at The Women’s Press throughout the 1980s). Suzanne Perkins, Art Director at TWP from its beginnings in 1978, commissioned a painting by Rachel Ross for the cover.

The current Headline paperback cover

Octavia E Butler in 2005. Photograph by Nikolas Coukouma (Wikimedia Commons)

Guest review by John Bowers QC: FALL, THE MYSTERY OF ROBERT MAXWELL by John Preston

"John Preston brings Captain Bob back to life ..."

After attending state school in Grimsby, John Bowers was called to the Bar in 1979 and took silk in 1998. He has practised primarily in employment law and human rights. He has written or been the co-author of fourteen books on employment law. He has been Principal of Brasenose College Oxford since 2015. He also sits as a Deputy High Court Judge.

It was always the roar of the helicopter which first gave away the that He was coming; then there was the entourage of lackies including Sir Peter Jay, and finally there was the Booming Voice. When I started out as a barrister, I was regularly ushered into the presence of Jan Hoch, who had by then become (after four other name changes) Robert Maxwell. But it would not just be myself in the luxurious upper floor of the Mirror Building (inevitably renamed Maxwell House); typically in the next room would be a group of trade union negotiators, in another Bulgarian ambassador and in a third some hapless executive who had not been dropped off by the side of the M40 road miles from anywhere. Maxwell would be speaking almost simultaneously Bulgarian, German and English. A butler would be hovering nearby with delicious canapés. The same scene would play out at his stately home Headington Hall, curiously owned by Oxford City, which I also visited when conducting a case about of all things his wine cellar.

Maxwell was a brooding presence, someone who thrived on chaos, but a man who could also by turns be charm personified. Nowadays, he is best known as father of his youngest daughter Ghislaine who languishes in a Brooklyn gaol because of the alleged activities of another monster.

John Preston (whose last book on Jeremy Thorpe was turned into a TV drama) brings Captain Bob back to life in his 300-page thriller Fall. The book is based on interviews with hundreds of people who knew him including members of the family. Preston places at centre stage the family background (most of the family died in the Holocaust). His own father was a violent man.

Preston quotes Bob Bagdikian, Dean of the Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism. who said “Neither Caesar nor FDR nor any Pole has commanded as much power to shape the information on which so many people depend,” but it was not enough for Bob; he wanted to beat the man with the same initials as he, Rupert Murdoch. It was the ongoing rivalry with Murdoch who was usually one step ahead. It was this rivalry that led to his precipitous fall financially and ultimately from his boat.

Richard Stott, one of his editors, said that “it was the uncertainty and deep insecurity of the true outsider, a man who feels he has been precluded from the world of others and had therefore determined to build his own, with his own rules for his own game”.

Maxwell determined that he was going to be Prime Minister but although he was MP for Buckingham for two terms, the highest public office he reached was as head of the House of Commons Catering Department, the ultimate thankless task.

The Fall is published by Viking.

More reviews by John Bowers:

The Room Where it Happened by John Bolton

Tribes by David Lammy

Guest review by Cindy Jefferies: EMPRESS DOWAGER CIXI by Jung Chang

"...what an accessible writer Chang is ... scrupulous in her research but brings the story alive by her vibrant style."

First published in 2001 for children, Cindy Jefferies found success with her Fame School series with Usborne Books, obtaining 22 foreign rights deals. Latterly writing fiction for adults as Cynthia Jefferies, her first title The Outrageous Fortune of Abel Morgan was published in November 2018. Her second title The Honourable Life of Thomas Chayne came out in November 2019 and is set during the English Civil Wars.

At the end of Jung Chang’s biography of the Empress Cixi, Chang says “looking back over the many horrific decades after Cixi’s demise, one cannot but admire this amazing stateswoman, flawed though she was.”

In modern China Cixi is not admired but Chang has done much painstaking research and has a different story to tell. Cixi was born in 1835. At 16 she was chosen to be a concubine of the Emperor Xianfeng, who was 19. Cixi had caught the young emperor’s eye and was one of several accepted. She was very ambitious, interested in politics and highly intelligent but the life she undertook was not for the faint-hearted and she was not chosen to be the Empress, but was ranked on the sixth of eight rungs for concubines.

Enclosed in the harem she became friends with the girl chosen to be empress. Having lost the Opium war against the British, the country was now obliged to accept imports of damaging opium, made in India and a valuable export for the British although it was banned in the UK. There was also the largest peasant rebellion in Chinese history, due to terrible famine. Cixi had opinions about all this, but voicing them could have led to her execution.

The emperor was frail and it was of great moment when Cixi gave birth to his first son. She was elevated to just below Empress Zhen in rank. When the Emperor died in 1861 his only son was five and the country was in a terrible situation. The Emperor had a closed door policy, but Cixi could see that this was making China weaker. Extraordinarily, with Empress Zhen supporting her she overthrew the regents in a bloodless coup and as Empress Dowager, she became the ruler of China, sitting behind the yellow silk screen behind the throne.

The story of the rule of Cixi must place her as one of the greatest female rulers in history. During her long life she steered this vast country from a medieval state to a modern one, introducing the telegraph, trains, modern education and governance and a more humane legal system. She fought wars, revolt, betrayal and made some mistakes. But she loved her country and believed in its people. European nations and Japan took brutal advantage while China slowly embraced the 19thC. Britain has little to be proud of at this time, with a few individual exceptions.

Anyone who has read Wild Swans will know what an accessible writer Chang is. She is scrupulous in her research but brings the story alive by her vibrant style. Just shy of 500 pages, I found the book almost unputdownable. China today is a superpower, and it seems the present ruler Xi is determined to be as absolute as Cixi, and to rule for life. But where Cixi wished her nation to become a democracy, Xi shows no sign of giving his people similar freedoms. I found myself wondering what the Empress Dowager would think if she could see her country now.

Empress Dowager Cixi is published by Vintage.

Guest review by Julie Cohen: SAGA by Brian K Vaughan and Fiona Staples

"At its best the marriage of words and pictures can accomplish some extraordinary storytelling that can’t be achieved by words alone."

Julie Cohen grew up in Maine and studied English at Brown University, Cambridge University and the University of Reading. Her award-winning novels have sold over a million copies worldwide, and she has twice been selected for the Richard and Judy Book Club in the UK. Julie runs an oversubscribed literary consultancy which has helped many writers go on to be published. She is a Vice President of the Romantic Novelists’ Association, founder of the RNA Rainbow Chapter, and a Patron of literacy charity ABC To Read. Her bestselling novel Together has been translated into eleven languages and optioned for television adaptation; The Two Lives of Louis & Louise was long-listed for the Polari Prize and has been optioned by Enderby Entertainment as a feature film. Her first historical novel, Spirited, will be published in July 2020. She lives in Berkshire with her family and a terrier of dubious origin.

www.julie-cohen.com

Twitter: @julie_cohen

I don’t remember how I got hooked on Saga. I’ve always loved graphic novels and comics. People who don’t read them think they’re all about superheroes and violence, but at its best the marriage of words and pictures can accomplish some extraordinary storytelling that can’t be achieved by words alone. Comics look simple, but their narrative can be incredibly complex. I was already a fan of Art Speigelman’s harrowing and beautiful Holocaust memoir Maus, and Neil Gaiman’s collaboration with various artists on the sprawling, mythic Sandman. I’m also in love with Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis or Un Ocean d#Amour by Grégory Panaccione and Wilfrid Lupano. And then there’s my current favourite, Alise Oseman’s gay teenage love story Heartstopper. 

Saga is special, though. It’s an epic space opera. It’s episodic, with a new volume in a continuing story coming out every year or so. Every volume starts with a dilemma, and ends on a cliffhanger, and in between is a convoluted, surprising story told across a diverse and inclusive cast of aliens, creatures, ghosts and machines.

At its heart, Saga is a Romeo and Juliet story. Alana, who has wings, is a soldier from the planet Landfall. Marko, who has horns, is a soldier from the moon Wreath. Their worlds have been at war since time immemorial, pulling in most of the galaxy to take sides and fight. Alana and Marko meet when Marko’s a prisoner of war, and Alana is his guard. Against all odds, the two of them fall in love. In fact, they bond over a trashy romance novel, which both of them can see is actually a revolutionary text about reconciliation and galactic peace.

The series begins when the couple are on the run and Alana is giving birth to their child, Hazel. Hazel is an impossible child - no one believes that Wings and Horns can ever get along, let alone procreate - and her existence is cause for Wings and Horns and all of their associated allies and enemies, assassins and journalists and bureaucrats and mercenaries and opportunists, to hunt the family across the galaxy. Alana, Marko and Hazel are joined by various characters including a ghost babysitter, disapproving in-laws, a robot prince with PTSD, an ecological spaceship, a transgender ex-con, and a race of religious meerkat-like sentients who are facing extinction. Other storylines involve a lovelorn assassin with a lie-detecting cat, a young girl rescued from sexual trafficking, a gay journalist couple from a homophobic amphibious planet, and the story of the war itself, which has become self-perpetuating, with its own economy, ideologies and so, so many casualties.

As a space opera, it has lots of action, tons of sex, and some pretty devastating character deaths. It’s fast-paced, both funny and sad, and the art is frankly gorgeous. We’re used to serials on television but it’s fun to read a serialised story—although be warned, the cliffhanger ending of Volume 9, the latest volume, is a shocker. And Vaughan and Staples have taken some time off the series to pursue other projects, so I’m not sure when it will be resolved.

Although it’s fast reading - there are very few words per page, after all - I find that it stands up to rereading and it’s an annual treat of mine to reread the entire series before I read the new volume. And one of the pleasures of Saga, like any cult classic, is to unexpectedly find fellow fans of the series.

As with all good science fiction, Saga is really about the world we live in now. It’s about mindless nationalism and how war benefits people in power whilst destroying the rest of us. It’s about how romance novels are seriously underrated. It’s about intolerance and prejudice. It’s about the effects of violence, not only on the victim but on the perpetrator. More than anything, it’s about the love between a couple and for their child, and what it means to be a family.

Saga is published by Image Comics.

Guest review by Marianne Kavanagh: AUTUMN by Ali Smith

"Funny, sad, affectionate and warm-hearted – a genuine joy to read."

Marianne Kavanagh is an author and journalist. Her third novel Should You Ask Me, and her latest novel Disturbance, are both published by Hodder & Stoughton. More details on her website.

I’ve been aware of Ali Smith for a while. I know she was shortlisted for the Booker in 2014 with How to Be Both, a book in two halves (and printed with either half first, because the order doesn’t matter). But I hadn’t read this, or any of her short stories, or any of her other well-known novels like The Accidental. I started reading Autumn, the first of her quartet of novels about the seasons, quite by chance. And now I’m hooked, I’m hooked, and have no choice but to go back and read everything she’s ever written.

As readers, we’re all very different. We read some books and think, ‘Meh.’ We read others and think, ‘Competent, yes, but where’s its heart?’ And then we get talking to our friends and discover they loved the ones we hated and wept over the ones that left us cold. So Autumn may not be the novel for you. But it’s very rare for me to find a book that overwhelms me quite like this, that leaves me spellbound and happy, the world changed, the future full of hope. Ali Smith passes on her love of language – imagery, wordplay, puns. Her sentences – Penelope Fitzgerald does this for me, too – make you look up and think, re-read, look up again. But there’s a plot pushing the novel forwards, too, and delicious passages that make you laugh (everything to do with rules and regulations), and characters you care about, and a whole back story about the Profumo affair, and women and Pop Art in the 1960s. It’s all set against a background of barbed wire and division, and the kind of rigid, angry place Britain has recently become, which somehow makes the novel both ordinary and extraordinary at the same time. Smith published Autumn in 2016 just after the referendum, and this is the backdrop to everything. As Elisabeth Demand (one of the central characters) says: ‘It’s like democracy is a bottle someone can threaten to smash and do a bit of damage with. It has become a time of people saying stuff to each other and none of it actually ever becoming dialogue.’

Dialogue, though, is central to the book. Daniel meets Elisabeth when she’s eight years old (there are 70 years between them). Right from the beginning, he teaches her to question her assumptions with a liveliness and logic that shape her thinking for the rest of her life. I love their discussions, particularly the one about the morality of lying (‘The power of the lie, Daniel said. Always seductive to the powerless’) and the whole sequence about making up stories, which has Daniel – to Elisabeth’s fury – suggesting that Goldilocks might have been a vandal who spray painted her name on the walls of the bears’ house (‘That’s not in the story,’ Elisabeth says. Daniel replies, ‘Who says?’). Maybe it’s because I’m reading Autumn in September 2019 with Trump being impeached and Johnson found guilty by the Supreme Court, but when Daniel says, ‘Whoever makes up the story makes up the world’ I find myself wincing.

I don’t know a lot about visual art. I always feel lost in galleries. But Smith makes Daniel’s passion for painting, which he passes on to Elisabeth, so vivid that I feel I can understand the power of colour and collage. There’s a passage describing a painter at work (‘it was really terribly alone’) that makes me think about the madness of writing novels – the kind of horrible, exhausting struggle that George Orwell described.

Autumn is, I think, a novel of ideas. But it’s securely rooted in everyday British life – daytime TV, family relationships, austerity, overblown officialdom. It’s funny, sad, affectionate and warm-hearted – a genuine joy to read.

Also, Elisabeth Demand would be proud of me. I took Autumn on a week’s holiday to a blustery Greek island. Once I’d started, I couldn’t stop. One afternoon, we went down to the hotel pool which, because of the weather, was completely deserted. I asked the manager if she could turn off the loud dance music echoing round the concrete slabs and palm trees so that I could read my book in peace. ‘But it’s a public area,’ she said. I looked round at the empty sun loungers, the closed umbrellas, the wind rippling the surface of the water. I looked back at the manager. ‘But I am the public,’ I said.

This is what happens with books like this. They teach revolution.

Autumn is published by Penguin.