I’ll start off straight and honest, I did not enjoy this book at all. I wouldn’t say I suffered through it though. It was easy enough to read and a welcomed change after the weight and complexity of Crime and punishment, the book I read just before. However, I have never felt as compelled to get my initial feelings out right after finishing a book, as I do right now. My frustration is at a fever pitch and my disappointment immeasurable.

My favourite book I have ever read is Parable of the Sower. One of the best written engaging books! I was enthralled by the world and the characters more than any book has done to me before. It was so enjoyable: with phenomenal world building, diverse characters, stakes and fear and loss. Moments so poignant and visible that I forget that it’s a book I read and not a film I watched. What a ride that was! After reading Parable of the Sower and Parable of the talents I was primed to venture onto Butler’s most acclaimed and recommended work.

Kindred. The story follows the tale of Dana a woman in 1970s California snatched from modern comfort and thrown inexplicably to the 19th century in the antebellum south. Immediately she realised that her call is predicated on a young boys peril, Rufus Weylin. Whenever he is in danger, his life in the balance, she is pulled back in time to save him. Finding him bobbing and struggling in the water she acts as anyone would, the human instinct to save the child. Grasping his body and grappling to shore they rest on the sand until a variable she had never considered seemed to matter quite a bit. He a young white boy being saved by a black woman. Moments later she endures a shriek and blows to her back, she looks up to see the barrel of a gun pointing down at her and a slur all too familiar to black people was about to become even more familiar to her.

This premise hooked me, especially when Dana realised that not only is she tethered to this boy and brought back for his safety, forcing her to acclimatise to life within slavery and a time she doesn’t belong to, but that Rufus was not just the son of a Slave master and inheritor of the plantation but Dana’s own ancestor. If she did not protect him her life may cease to exist.

I am not going to go through the entire plot. There are parts of the book I find perfectly tolerable and as a whole it’s not the worst story I have read. That said, the one part of this book that I find egregious and inexcusable from an author I know possesses such wit and skill is the characters within the story. They are written so poorly. Again, coming off the back of Crime and punishment which is the most expertly written book I have ever had the pleasure (and sometimes displeasure) of reading, I was of course now reading a very different style. I was dissatisfied with the characters immediately yet I thought it was unfair to compare the two as maybe it was not that Butler’s writing was flat but that I had grown accustomed to a standard so different. I believed I just needed time to adjust. Finishing the book I can say that the benefit of the doubt that I awarded Butler was completely undeserved, the writing was just poor. The characters are all indistinguishable in their manner of speaking, besides some of the slaves as their language includes a different drawl and vernacular. However, it sometimes felt less like I was reading characters converse and more like words on a page with the sole purpose of pushing the narrative. Everyone sounded exactly the same Tom Weylin, Rufus Weylin, Dana and Kevin Franklin. None of them felt real or fleshed out they all faded into a name or role, Slave master, Slave master’s son, Main character and Main characters husband. I grew bored.

Conversations felt exhausting and the writing was clunky, whenever Dana conversed with Rufus the dialogue felt flat and expected. No responses ever surprised me, no character was ever unearthed. Saying they felt two dimensional would be a compliment, absolutely everything fell flat. I felt as though Butler got lazy, as rich emotional moments were often punctuated with a “I shrugged” “He shrugged” “She shrugged” There was so much shrugging that my eyes began to seek the sight of the back of my head. The characters are so interchangeable that even their mannerisms are the same. The shrugging soon became emblematic of my own sentiment reading along, I began not to care at all.

From the river, to the fight, I struggled through the writing and characters because besides the physical danger that Dana faced having to play the role of slave, (and endure the consequences of such dehumanisation) the peril that really drew me in was the separation between Kevin and Dana. The two are married and found their interracial relationship to be Dana’s saving grace. Kevin was able to pose is Dana’s master, to the dismay of them both. However, doing so meant she couldn’t be bought by Weylin and could avoid the whip for much longer. This for me presented an obviously uncomfortable dynamic added to a relationship I otherwise didn’t know much about. I was happy for Dana’s safety however, with the safety of Rufus’ and Kevin’s protection, she too quickly began to feel too comfortable. A trait I don’t think she ever grew out of even after being whipped.

‘Rufe’ became by biggest bugbare with this book. Dana’s ridiculous habit of giving this boy a nickname. At first I understood it as in his youth he was a perceptibly harmless boy. A product of his time no doubt but a boy who had the potential to learn and grow. I thought Dana’s belief that she could somehow change Rufus’ beliefs on race, supremacy and slavery was naive at best. Nonetheless, I can understand why she would meet him as a child and be lulled into believing he could become more than what was expected. By the time Rufus grew up and his crimes and actions became more indisputably heinous, the rape of Alice, the purchase of Alice, him lying about sending Dana’s letters to Kevin, the threats to kill Dana, sending Dana to work in the fields out of spite, the selling of Sam, the sending away of Alice’s children and the eventual attempted rape of Dana. I found her insistance to speak to him like there was a relationship between them, a softness that warranted such a tender and endearing name throughout the entirety of this book. Ridiculous. Even as he was attempting to rape her she went on about even now she couldn’t hate him. I grew disgusted with Dana. Eventually, ‘Rufe’ should’ve been replaced with Rufus to signal the death of the love she once felt for him. I expected there to be a moment where she let go of the memories of the child she once protected and instead came to understand the reality of the man he had grown into.

Dana was more offended by Margaret’s verbal attacks and having a hot pot of coffee thrown at her, than Rufus’ abuse of Alice, him pulling Dana into being a secondary perpetrator of that same abuse of Alice, the psychological and emotional abuse he inflicted on her, the punishments others had to endure in her stead and the physical abuse he allowed or enacted on her. Dana was instead, for more than half of the book, positioned to make excuses for him or believe that she could talk him into smarter more humane decisions when time and time again Rufus showed her that he was no different from his father and couldn’t be much convinced by a word she had to say.

The last two visits after Kevin had been safely returned home I found exhausted the time travel excitement fully. I was genuinely relieved once Dana and Kevin were reunited and home. I would’ve permitted one final return to the past, but to extend it to two felt like we were stretching for word count. I would’ve appreciated a swifter ending. I would’ve appreciated there never being Dana’s transformation from being a mother figure to Rufus into an object of desire and ownership. Ew. It was unnecessary and a different emotional climax would’ve been more powerful. It became banal and exasperating and like the most cliched way this story could’ve ended.

My gripe with Dana is that, though I understand Butler used her character to show how easily people can adapt to slavery and exist within it, I found her too hypocritical to stomach. I perceived her to become the exact ‘Mammy’ stereotype she turned up her nose at Sarah for being. She nurses Rufus back to health, manages his feelings and talks Alice into his bed. As well as this, she exhibited feelings of moral/intellectual superiority over Alice, criticising her actions and plans to run away with young children, whilst Dana herself was similarly dependent on Rufus’ goodwill and his promises of protection. And most frustratingly her rebellion came only when her ancestry was ensured and her future existence secured, Dana’s breaking point only came when Rufus turned on her. She was right to defend herself, and I don’t fault her for that moment. What I can’t get past is everything that came before it. She watched him rape Alice, sell Sam, and send Alice’s children away, and still called him “Rufe.” Dana says “I could accept him as my ancestor, my younger brother, my friend, but not as my master, and not as my lover.” Her line was only ever about herself. I wish there had been a moment, before he came for her, where she saw him clearly for what he’d done to everyone else. I wish she had turned on him for Alice, or out of guilt for the part she played. Instead, by the time she finally fights back, her ancestry is secure and the cost is mostly hers. It made the ending feel like Rufus was being punished for the personal crime of crossing a boundary, not for all the harm he had inflicted on everyone around him.

I know what Butler is capable of, which is exactly why this one stung.

1.5 stars. I shrugged.