4.5/5 (Very Good)

Octavia E. Butler’s Clay’s Ark (1984) is the final published volume of her Patternist sequence (1976-1984).¹ It is the third novel according to the internal chronology of the series. Clay’s Ark is, without doubt, the most horrifyingly bleak science fiction novel I have ever read.² It’s stark. It’s sinister. It’s at turns deeply affective before descending into extreme violence and displaced morality. The moral conundrum that underpins the central problem, the spread of an extraterrestrial disease, unfurls with an unnerving alien logic. Butler’s characters are trapped by the demands of the alien microbes, scarred by the pervasive sense that their humanity is slipping away, and consumed by the fear of starting an epidemic. A true confrontation of the moment cannot lead to anything other than suicide or the first steps towards an apocalyptic transformation.

Note: This novel is not for readers seeking happy adventure or diverting escapism. It is an absolute bludgeon of the novel with a litany of unsettling themes, power dynamics, and disturbing scenes (rape, incest, a beheading, etc.). I apologize for the short review. Despite my appreciation of Clay’s Ark in particular, I struggle to write about Butler’s work.³

As always, there are spoilers below.

The Geography of the Wreckage

California, 2021 A.D. Across an almost “primordial” desert a few scattered “communities were dead or dying” (18). A few foolish, and well-armed, souls brave the distances between urban “enclaves” in armored vehicles. In the cities, the enclaves are “islands” surrounded by “vast, crowded, vulnerable residential areas through which ran sewers of utter lawlessness” (32).

Blake Jason Maslin, a doctor of internal medicine, travels across the expanse with his twin sixteen-year-old daughters (Keira and Rane), both “naive, and sheltered” (32), on a final trip to see a relative. Keira suffers from an untreatable leukemia. She confides that she sees “herself fading away” (6). On the way they’re abducted by Eli, Meda, and their strange, unusually thin, ill-looking, followers. They take Blake and his daughters to an isolated homestead with gardens, solar panels, and strange children that seem to run on all four limbs. “Everybody here looks like me, sooner or later” Meda confesses (23). Under duress, Blake is paired off with Meda, who scratches his face. Rane with Eli. And Keira with Stephen Kaneshiro. The ritualized infection commences.

A few years earlier, an injured Eli, possessed by an extra-human will to survive, happened across the homestead and its original inhabitants, followers of an “angry God” (56). Despite comments about his race, they took him in and cared for him. We soon learn Eli, a geologist, was the sole survivor of a sabotaged spaceship, the titular Clay’s Ark. On their voyage, the crew encountered an alien pathogen that develops a parasitical relationship with those that survive the infection. In return for heightened senses, the infected must infect and impregnate others or bear offspring of the infected. After impregnating the three surviving women of the homestead, Eli plans his first abduction (101). He promises, as if to convince himself that he’s still a human with a moral code, to only spread the disease as much as necessary to satiate the new biological urge. He’ll gather his new “family” at the homestead. They’ll develop a strategy to convince the infected to stay. If someone escapes, the world will be transformed. But everyone knows that isolation will only last so long. Someone will escape.

Both the narrative of Blake and his family and Eli’s simultaneously map the new nature of the wreckage and presage the future apocalyptic transformation that looms.

New Families in the Wasteland

As academic study of Butler’s science fiction abounds, I will only briefly discuss an element that I personally found fascinating–in this instance the unnerving new sense of family and connection Eli and his followers create.⁴ Butler explains that the works in the Patternist sequence sought to write a good story about a “strange community of people.”⁵ Butler’s careful world building creates a pervasive sense of social and moral disconnect. The wealthy and privileged, like Blake and his children, rarely travel outside of their urban oasis. The world outside can barely be described as human: “what the rat packs did to each other and to unprotected city-dwellers was not something [Blake] wanted to expose his daughters to” (137). Thus, inside the oases they attempt to “recreate the safe world of […] sixty years past for [their] children” (32). Blake’s trip is an attempt to reaffirm the ties that bind: Keira’s illness, and the fear of imminent death, made her want to visit her grandparents “one last time” (4).

Eli’s arrival in the past at the homestead and his abduction of Blake and his children reveal the strange new family in the wasteland. These are connections formed by “guilt and grief” (87). These are connections compelled through violence and an alien biology. While the children of the infected appear inhuman, they are still children. These are connections welded by the desire to make some semblance of normality in the abnormality of it all. Even Gabriel Boyd, the patriarch of the religious community that took Eli in, must push away the knowledge that Eli caused the devastation, and begs him to take care of Meda, his daughter (85). Rane must confront her desire for Eli. Keira must confront her feelings for Stephen: “You’ve sacrificed my family to spare yours” (93), yet when he puts her arm around her, “she was surprised that the gesture did not offend her” (91). Both girls are underage. How much is the alien microbe responsible for their actions? Blake must juggle his parental responsibility to protect his children with the need to alert the world to the illness. And Keira, in the final calculus of it all, attempts to forge a connection. The effective rendering of the moral landscape, and its networks of power, of the new age is the novel’s most unsettling, and brilliant, element.

Final Thoughts

As with Mind of My Mind (1977), I found Butler’s brutal view of power–and its interplay with relationships, gender, and race–a heady mixture. Perhaps due to the vividly realized dystopian backdrop of the community surrounded by the dry desert air and looming hyper-violent doom, I struggled less with Butler’s deliberately stark, clipped, and direct prose than in the past. I even found a metaphor tucked in here and there that accentuated the horror of it all. Simultaneously, Butler’s use of the two parallel narratives creates a simple but effective way to reveal backstory and the horrifying dichotomy of Eli’s position as bringer of the plague and community builder.

Clay’s Ark (1984) supplants Mind of My Mind (1977) as my favorite in the Patternist sequence. I am including both Wild Seed (1980) and Patternmaster (1976) despite abandoning both (I’ll try one of them again next year). I even think Clay’s Ark challenges Kindred (1979), which I never managed to review, as my favorite Butler novel so far.⁶

If my earlier caveat did not scare you off, go find a copy.

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Notes

1. A short story “A Necessary Being” was posthumously published in 2014. It takes place after Clay’s Ark (1984) but before her disowned Survivor (1978). I highly recommend Gerry Canavan’s monograph Octavia E. Butler (2016). As I’ve mentioned on the site before, Canavan explores Butler’s frequent rewrites, reconceptualization(s) of earlier material, and abandoned projects via her surviving papers. ↩︎
2. P. C. Jersilds’ After the Flood (1982, trans. 1986) and The Genocides, Thomas M. Disch (1965) might give Butler a run for her money. That said, I found both Disch and Jersild’s novels more grotesques in a Boschian sort of way than an relentlessly bleak moral conundrum. Russ’ We Who Are About To… (1976) also came to mind — but I found humor in her way of telling, not so much with Butler. ↩︎
3. Probably due to the spectacular range of scholarship written about her work. ↩︎
4. A brief search reveals a lot of academic scholarship on the nature of “family” in the novel. I have not read it before writing the review for fear of being dissuaded from writing anything. ↩︎
5. Referenced nabbed from Wikipedia. The article on the sequence cites “An interview with Octavia E. Butler” from 1997 in Callaloo, 20 (1), 47–66. ↩︎
6. I’ve also read and wrote a short review for Dawn (1987). ↩︎

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