I'm a huge Octavia Butler fan, but somehow I had never read Fledgling, the last book she wrote before her untimely death in 2006. Vampires aren't usually my thing, and there's always something melancholy about reading books by favorite deceased authors knowing there will never be more (luckily I have most of Butler's Patternist series yet to read).
I recently taught Butler's Kindred in a class on horror and philosophy and I had read and enjoyed Stephen King's 'Salem's Lot, so I thought vampires maybe aren't so bad and maybe Butler would do interesting things with the concept.
And she did! Fledgling is an interesting science fictional take on vampires with some deeper thoughts on identity, difference, bigotry, belonging, freedom, and memory. It's not my favorite Octavia Butler book by a long shot (that's probably Parable of the Talents), nor is it really a horror novel (Kindred is more horrific than this). But I'm glad I read Fledgling.
I should probably start by addressing the uncomfortable elephant in the review: the protagonist looks like a ten-year-old girl even though she is actually 53 (the "vampires" age more slowly than humans). There's plenty of graphic sexual activity between her and full grown human adults right from the first few chapters, and it's super skeevy. Now, it's supposed to be skeevy. Butler fans may not be shocked (a lot of her other work deals with skeevy situations of the human or human-alien variety). Somewhere I read that Butler maybe even intended this as a sort of satire of the vampire genre. Whatever's going on, just be forewarned. Readers especially sensitive to reading about anything like child sexual abuse (even if that's not technically what this is) may want to steer clear.
I admit the skeeviness put me off a bit. Even though that's probably the point, it can be a bit much. Also, when it's not skeeving out the reader, the novel moves pretty slowly. It's not a long book (just over 300 pages), but it can sometimes feel long. I can't say I found any of the characters particularly compelling, aside from maybe the older woman, Theodora, who becomes a symbiont of Shori, the main character. Shori herself is okay, although she's the equivalent of an adolescent. And she has amnesia. It's not that I didn't care what happened to her. I did. But she felt a bit two-dimensional (maybe it was the amnesia?).
So what did I like about the book? I found the whole idea of the Ina fascinating. They're not the vampires of lore, but rather a different species that has lived alongside humans for at least 10,000 years. Nobody knows whether they evolved on Earth or were originally extraterrestrials. Since Shori (the protagonist) begins the book with amnesia and separated from her family, we learn about her people as she does. The Ina are vampiric enough that it becomes clear that our legends are inspired by them, although of course they are merely long lived flesh and blood beings who do, it turns out, actually eat flesh and blood even if they don't kill humans or turn them into vampires. The Ina do need humans, but they are symbionts and even when drinking blood the saliva of the Ina contains a chemical that makes the humans feel euphoric (And this is not remotely sexual. Just kidding.).
Another vampiric trait of the Ina is that they are mostly pale and nocturnal, but they use genetic engineering to give Shori characteristics of a black human, which makes her a human-Ina hybrid and allows her to go outside during the day. (Did Octavia Butler know about the Blade comics and movies? Maybe.)
The plot unfolds as we learn that Shori's family has been deliberately attacked. Was it humans fearful of the "vampires" in the neighborhood? Was it other Ina seething with hatred and fear of what she represents? I won't spoil this, but it does give Butler an interesting way to talk about identity and bigotry, especially because it may be that the very thing others hate about Shori is in fact her greatest strength.
The fact that Shori has lost her memory and is disconnected from her past and her cultural identity is probably also a not-so-subtle dramatization of the position of many African-Americans after a few hundred years of slavery, segregation, and economic/cultural disparity.
Related to both of these issues is the issue of freedom. We learn that each Ina has a handful of human symbionts, forming a (queer?)(polyamorous?) family unit. As if this doesn't make family complicated enough, the Ina also tend to mate in groups - one set of Ina siblings mates with another set of siblings. Anyway, the Ina depend on their symbionts, and the symbionts want to be there, although they are also under the influence of powerful chemical bonding after being bitten by the Ina several times.
Are either the Ina or the human symbionts really free? How do their ties that bind reflect on ours - social, familial, sexual, cultural, etc.? Are any of us free in the sense of the atomistic individualism fetishized in so much early modern European political theory and American libertarianism? Would you want to be free in that sense? Is our own symbiosis with the people around us unavoidable whether we desire it or not? And, more deeply, what would it even mean to desire something that is inescapable?
Can I forgive Fledgling for not being my favorite Octavia Butler book, or even her best treatment of these very questions, if it gives me another taste of whatever bittersweet nectar she conjures on the page?
See also my Goodreads review.
Fabulous post
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