Clay’s Ark (Patternmaster #3)
By Octavia Butler
Publication Year: 1984
Type: Fiction
Genre: sci-fi, fantasy
Read on 2022-11-07
★★☆☆☆
As expected, Clay’s Ark is an entirely different beast than the first two Patternist books. There is also no mention of the psionic abilities of the first two books at all except for one tenuous throwaway reference two-thirds of the way in. The setting and set-up reminds me very much of The Host by Stephanie Meyer as well as the Animorphs series weirdly enough, which I read as a kid (I’m certain there are other more canonical sci-fi books with a covert parasitic alien invasion premise, but alas these are my honest references.) The post-apocalyptic dessert setting, rife with crime, kitted out junk cars, and shady “sewer” people, also conjures images of Mad Max: Fury Road.
This nostalgia and a compelling setting at the beginning of the book are pretty much the only pro’s for me.
Let’s start with the multiple timelines—a convention not used in the prior books. The chapters alternate between past and present timelines, when an astronaut Eli first brought an alien parasite to Earth on the ship “Clay’s Ark” and when a single father Blake and his two daughters are kidnapped by Eli and his community to feed their virus-driven compulsion to infect others. The present timeline also flashes back from/between Blake’s perspective to the daughters throughout their first and second kidnapping by yet another group. Annoying? Yes. Does it feel like the author is constantly withholding information for the sake of suspense? Yes. Ultimately unnecessary and incredibly repetitive? Yes, very. The multiple timelines and flashbacks were a pretty cheap way to drive suspense and create momentum, and ultimately left me feeling like we could’ve just had a straightforward story about Eli, the patient-zero as well as a Christ-like figure who attempts to lead his sheep through the moral perils of their infected compulsions.
The present timeline and ostensibly the primary story about this double kidnapping just didn’t seem like one that needed to be told, and it ultimately didn’t seem to have a clear message or point either. The book satisfies as neither an alien pandemic story nor a post-apocalyptic story. Between this book and Patternmaster (set much further into an alien-infested Earth), we could’ve had any number of more interesting stories—maybe one fully about patient zero/Christ figure Eli . Maybe one of a doctor like Blake or even just Blake himself but as a witness to a fully fledged outbreak. Or maybe a story fully about this deeply stratified time in post-/mid-apocalyptic America wherein everyone outside a safe wealthy “enclave” has descended into anarchic and misanthropic violence. This would’ve been far more interesting than the repetitive plot we actually got.
SPOILERS BELOW
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SPOILERS BELOW 〰️
The climax of the book is a fever-storm of explicit bloody violence, senseless killing and cruelty including gang rape and torture (both against adults and children, though the latter is largely implied rather than described), as well as mass shooting, explosions, brutal hand-to-hand/knife fights, etc.
Why write a book about the same family experiencing two back-to-back kidnappings leading to rape? What is the difference between the two kidnappings and what point is there in the comparison between the two? The “good” kidnappers led by Eli get an origin story of how they came to be. The “bad” kidnappers/rat pack are never truly humanized, with the exception of the one young biracial woman who described being born into instability. (This character is a foil for Blake’s daughters, who are biracial teenagers who lived very sheltered lives from within a safe enclave. Blake, under the influence of the virus, has questionably consensual sex with this woman, but Butler also very vividly describes how he and one of his daughters tried very hard to have compulsive sex with each other so I kind of wonder if in an earlier draft the incest happened directly rather than through a very transparent proxy.) With how incredibly, explicitly vile the actions of the latter kidnappers are, I just simply can’t accept that Butler’s point was to say that both groups were equally subject to conditions beyond their control and forced into equally wretched acts.
In yet another repetitive plot point, Blake escapes a second time from the second kidnapping, only to be brutally senselessly killed by a stray thief off-screen. His final act before dying is to infect the thief, who gets away and finally spread the virus Eli has tried so hard to contain to the general population. There is no point to this, apart from signalling the global spread of the alien virus we know must happen between now and Patternmaster has begun. As he dies, Blake says that the uninfected are no more human than the diseased Clay’s Ark people. So what was the point of showing Eli’s entire struggle to contain the virus and struggle a? What was the point of humanizing the creature-like children of infected women?
While Clay’s Ark deals with common Butler themes of moral struggle, it is neither as lucid a nod to historical enslavement like Wild Seed nor as clearly about the struggle to make moral, humane, compassionate choices under oppressive conditions not of one’s choosing as Mind of My Mind.
