Clay's Ark by Octavia E. Butler Summary and Reviews
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Book Reviews of Clay's Ark
Book Review: Not Butler's Best
Summary: 3 Stars
I was so enthralled by "Dawn" and the subsequent books in that trilogy that I set out to read everything I could by Butler. Overall I find her novels to be exceptional sci-fi with some very thought provoking anthropology and history thrown into the mix. I was disappointed in Clay's Ark, and I think it was primarily because, compared to Butler's other novels, it was the leanest. While she comments on the bleak direction the future of the U.S. is headed in, this tale did not stay with me or terrify me the way the "Parable" books did. I didn't feel as attached to these characters as I did to their parallel counterparts in the Patternmaster. It's an interesting story, but not Butler at her best. If you're as obsesseive as I am about my favorite authors, read it anyway! If you're new to Butler, start with Parable of the Sower or Dawn.Book Review: OK but not Butler's best
Summary: 3 Stars
Other things I've read by Octavia have been solid and brilliant. A bit of a disappointment, this book didn't quite stand on its own for me... I haven't read the others in the series. Very little exposition of the background leading to the central dilemma... "Clay's Ark" gets only a few paragraphs. Character development is strong, plot is weak. A family is captured and tries to escape. A lot of ideas are examined, but nothing seems to come of it...Book Review: This is an exceptional story by an exceptional writer.
Summary: 5 Stars
Clay's Ark is a wonderful taut, gripping and suspenseful tale. Butler really forces the reader to analyze his or her perceptions of what it really means to be human by delving deeply in to human behavior and ethical issues. Ethical issues such as: gang violence, racism, suicide, artificial insemination, AIDS, etc. I highly recommend the text. It should be required reading in literature classes for students to discuss and write about "big questions" and problems that affect our world. Further, Ms. Butler's use of metaphor, simile and foreshadowing is outstanding. The images she creates with words are vivid and concise. Any reader can visualize this story.I wish that whoever wrote the synopsis of the book for the web page knew that Asa Elias Doyle is a male, not a female!
Book Review: Too much pain, not enough gain
Summary: 3 Stars
I have read everything Octavia Butler has in print. I adore her depth of emotion and insight that goes into every story she writes.CLAY'S ARK is the exception. This is easily her worst book. But remember, Octavia's worst is still better than most author's best.
Simply put, if an artist is going to take me to hell, they better teach me something important. This book contains gang rape scenes of a young leukemia-victim girl, bloody fights described in excruciating detail, an relentless stream of utterly mind-numbing scenes of violence.
And, unlike PARABLE OF THE SOWER, which also contains many difficult scenes and images, you get virtually nothing from the story. No lessons, no hope, nothing. Octavia has written that she was very depressed when writing this book, sharing chapters with a friend who was suffering from a terminal illness. I respect that this reflects where she was, but that doesn't mean I want to go there with her.
And those of you wanting to read everything in the Patternist series should know that CLAY'S ARK barely touches on threads from the other books. I was sucked into reading it to satisfy my completist strain as well, and suffered for it.
Skip it. Period. Read all her other works.
Book Review: Vestiges of humanity in the California desert
Summary: 4 Stars
The last book to be published in the Patternist series (republished as "Seed to Harvest"), "Clay's Ark" chronicles the beginnings of the primitivist race of mutants that haunt and hunt the "civilized" Patternists who dominate "Patternmaster," Butler's first novel. So, while "Wild Seed" and "Mind of My Mind" explain the evolution of the Patternists, this chapter seeks to tell the "other" side of the story: how a different group of humans who had been infected by an alien disease mutated into a murderous and infectious species exhibiting feline grace and brute instinct. In some ways, the series is Butler's version of H. G. Wells's pitting of Eloi against Morlocks, updated to include telepathy, viral mutation, and other sci-fi obsessions of recent decades.
This summary explains how the book fits in the series, but the truth is that "Clay's Ark" stands on its own; there are no Patternists in "Clay's Ark" and you don't need to know anything about the other books before reading it. This is the story of how one family--a father and his two daughters--are captured and held hostage for mysterious reasons by a cult of semi-violent outlaws, who initially seem to be passive-aggressive psychopaths hiding out in the anarchic California desert of the near future and who have the outwardly uncontrollable urge to smell and touch, scratch and bite their victims. The first half of the book, with its hints of incest and the threat of cannibalism and rape, is more like a horror story, vaguely reminiscent of "The Hills Have Eyes," which was in turn inspired by the legend of the Sawney Bean clan.
Alternating between the family's imprisonment in the "present" and the beginnings of the cult in the past, Butler sets her isolated society on a larger moral stage than these grisly antecedents might suggest. We soon realize that the members of this "cult" are survivors of an often-lethal extraterrestrial organism, and it's a constant battle between the "decent" (human) impulses of the community members and the survivalist (animal) instincts of the virus--a virus that make suicide "impossible" by embellishing its victims with an "unconscious will to survive that transcended any conscious desire, any guilt, any duty to those who had once been fellow humans." Yet vestiges of humanity remain, and the infected group has deliberately shut itself off from society to avoid spreading the epidemic; nobody leaves "the ranch, except to bring in supplies and converts"--the latter simply to satiate the minimal evolutionary demands of the virus. The problem for the future, however, is their offspring...
All of this doesn't keep Blake Maslin and his daughters from trying to escape, even after they begin to show symptoms--first from Stockholm syndrome, then of the disease itself. What's startling is how Butler tests your allegiances--if you root for Blake and his family to get away, then you are no better than their kidnappers, since their escape will mean the infection (and demise) of all of human civilization. Who are the real heroes here, Butler asks. Given this impossible set of circumstances, what is altruism? What drives us to be "human"? But don't let me mislead you: all the pondering over what it means to be civilized or selfless or human doesn't get in the way of a taut and grisly adventure.