When starting this book I still had the masterpiece that is Parable of the Sower by Octavio Butler still stuck in my mind. Like the faint smell of rain soaked into the grass after a storm it lingered in my mind, how it created a world molded by the societal issues of the 90s that have remained unsolved and themes touched upon with a lens, unlike other books in its genres. When we were told to read The Hungry Tide for class, as it explores similar themes, I had expected it to be of the same grandiose as Sower. Perhaps that expectation soured my reading experience, as I was constantly waiting for that moment when I would realize why it was worthy of making our list of assigned readings. I didn’t connect with it as I did with Sower, but that does not make it a bad book. Far from it actually, the two have just very different approaches to their topics. Sower for instance is very on the nose with how its world has fallen from grace. In the first few pages, we are given a hint to this dystopian society with the description of the father of the main character’s church.

“But after it had been slept in by the homeless, robbed, and vandalized several times, someone poured gasoline in and around it and burned it down. Seven of the homeless people sleeping inside on that last night burned with it” (Parable of the Sower, pg 11)

    The Hungry Tide however is more of a slowburn towards the destruction,both the biggest example and the reveal of it. It isn’t until page 26 that the reader is given a hint about the troubles the island faces.

“But still, it amazed him that someone from a background like hers had lasted in Lusibari as long as she had — he knew from his mother’s accounts that they belonged to a family that was notable for its attachment to creature comforts. And in Lusibari, as he knew from experience, there was little to be had by way of comforts and amenities.” (Pg 26)

    Even then it could be explained away as poverty and unfortunately, many of us are used to seeing the impoverished and poverty without much thought aside from pity. The issues that plague the world of The Hungry Tide are addressed less directly than the issues discussed in Sower. Climate change and the disappearance of animals, stronger animals taking their place and clashing with humanity are less easy to give a single cause to, unlike a drug epidemic where many blame those who take the drugs instead of looking at the broader picture. In turn, this grounds The Hungry Tide closer to reality compared to Sower, it’s just difficult to see at first since most readers live in/adjacent to similar situations or are used to hearing about them on the news.

The main characters of The Hungry Tide by Amitav Ghosh, Kanai and Piya, serve the purpose of being surrogates for readers who are not familiar with the real life setting of the book. They are both outsiders looking in just as the reader is and are fed information while also allowing the reader to see through their eyes and learn more about the area and its culture as they do. In writing this is known as an audience surrogate character,similar to the trope of “The Everyman”. As explained by TV tropes.com on their page about this character type 

“[The Everyman is] A character who is ordinary enough to be relatable to the average audience member. Everyman characters are often working or middle-class people with regular jobs and they deal with everyday problems, be it school, work, family or romance”

   Characters serving as the everyman are not always blank slates,however compared to the supporting cast they are often more grounded. Though these terms may seem interchangeable,they are very different upon closer analysis. The audience surrogate does not have to fit the personalities often attributed to the everyman,such as Kanai and Piya. They are introduced to aspects of the Sundarban culture by other characters,however, neither can be described as fitting the relatable everyman trope. While both are used to share information with the audience, personality-wise they are complete opposites. 

     Often the everyman character is painted as likable. From the first page, Kanai is decidedly not so. His first thought when seeing Piya is to judge her as if she was an object. When describing her androgynous appearance the text says he was not ‘deceived’. The usage of this word implies that it was his right to know her gender assigned at birth. He then proceeds to describe her,contrasting her appearance to his image of a native Indian woman.

“…his eyes settled on her slim, shapely figure. Her face was long and narrow, with an elegance of line markedly at odds with the severity of her haircut. There was no bindi on her forehead and her arms were free of bangles and bracelets, but on one of her ears was a silver stud, glinting brightly against the sun-deepened darkness of her skin” (Pg 11)

      Her deviances from this perceived image are described as being ‘at odds’ with her femininity and the places where she did conform to his perceived image it is seen as a sort of diamond in the rough. Perhaps it is my own bias as I am nonbinary and I,along with many of my trans siblings,have been put in similar situations as Piya regarding our appearance,but I didn’t take this passage as a simple description. As we are seeing the world through Kanai’s eyes,he comes off to me at least as extremely self-centered. This point is further proven when he gets on the train to Kolkata. His first action upon finding out he didn’t like the seat he had found,instead of simply looking for another,is to ask a man already sitting by the window to switch seats. The man only obliges because of the “otherness” of Kanai’s more western appearance which he associates with authority figures. Piya describes him as the sort of man who thinks that they were granted entitlement due to their class and education to a world where life’s challenges would always be swept away to make their life easier, exemplified after he knocks her hand and ends up with some of her spilled tea on him. 

“Do I really have a choice?” he said in a tone more challenging than ironic. “Does anyone have a choice when they’re dealing with Americans these days?”

    Piya is closer to the everyman character type,though she too diverges from complying fully to the trope. The everyman trope is rooted mostly in the assumption that the everyman is a cisgender heterosexual white middle-class man so that is partially a reason. After this interaction regarding the spilled tea, she feigns admiration at his observation to avoid an argument. She smiles to placate him and every second she spends trying to appeal to his self-centered attitude is described as forced,almost painful to keep up until he mentions how many languages he knows. The interactions she has up with him are all to satisfy him,taking the initiative to clean him up after he spilled her tea. On a slightly positive note,her job also keeps her from falling into the everyman trope. She is a cetologist,currently traveling to Canning to get a permit to do a survey of Sundarbans marine mammals. She is extremely passionate about her job,forgoing the usual survey process due to a team’s last-minute rejection letter in her field last year in order to have a better chance of getting the permit. It is made clear that this environment is new to her,and not many people would choose to be in her situation,much less without a guide. Even Kanai, self-centered as he is,upon finding out she doesn’t know the language remarks

“But tell me this,” he said. “If you don’t know any Bengali or Hindi, how are you planning to find your way around over there?” (Pg 16)

And Piya responds

“I’ll do what I usually do,” she said with a laugh. “I’ll try to wing it. Anyway, in my line of work there’s not much talk needed.” (Pg 16)

      As it is later shown once she is offered government aid via a bodyguard,at times she puts her work above her own personal feelings. She suspects at first that she is being scammed once he arrives unannounced but bites her tongue knowing questioning it may lead to her chances of surveying the dying population of marine mammals in the Sundarbans. This is a far cry from the everyman’s average nine-to-five office job and I find the personality given to her despite her role as the audience surrogate fascinating. I also appreciate this separation was given to Kanai,I just personally dislike him as a person.

The Future Is Here: Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower by Octavia E. Butler is not a book I had much thought on before reading. The most knowledge I had of the novel was that it was speculative fiction, and I haven’t had much interaction with the genre. I sometimes mix the genre up with dystopian future, as that genre often commentates on modern problems or changes in society. Because of this I unfairly assumed that this book would feel similar to other dystopian future stories such as The Hunger Games, Divergent, or The Giver. The reputation of the genre was sullied by a mix of the many knockoffs of The Hunger Games, authors who did not understand the purpose of the genre or give any meaningful commentary, and society’s general hatred of things aimed at teenagers and young adults so I was weary when picking up this book. I expected it to fall into the tropes of the more shallow books in the genre, however, this book surprised me by subverting those tropes.

   My first surprise was how realistic the book felt in comparison to the above-mentioned books. It feels closer to another book in the genre, “The Handmaid’s Tale”. It is a dystopian future, however, there are very few fantastical elements that would make it blend in with more popular young adult dystopian novels or works of speculative fiction. The closest I can think of is the main character’s hyperempathy extending beyond feelings and into sharing the others’ physical pain. Even then I may be wrong, as my knowledge of hyper-empathy only extends to how it affects people with autism, borderline personality disorder, depression, and anxiety. The future the main character lives in is the result of problems we are currently facing, and the lack of any fantasy elements makes the connection even more believable in my opinion. Most of the world lives in poverty, the politicians mentioned in the book have little to an effect on the world and are trying to bring it back to “normal”, essentially how the world was before slow violence set in. What really stuck with me is the main character’s discussion with her friend.

“Things are changing now, too. Our adults haven’t been wiped out by a plague so they’re still anchored in the past, waiting for the good old days to come back. But things have changed a lot, and they’ll change more. Things are always changing. This is just one of the big jumps instead of the little step-by-step changes that are easier to take. People have changed the climate of the world. Now they’re waiting for the old days to come back.” (Pg 56 – 57)

  This sentiment is a good summary of the conflict between millennials, generation Z, and older generations. Their entire conversation reads as millennial and Gen Z’s view of the current world and the future, a mix of dread and despair. Despair because this is the world they have grown up in and are used to and dread because the worst is inevitable and the people who are in charge who have the power to change things refuse to take action. Even then some things have gotten so out of control that any single person or group of people can’t change it. I’ve thought and had this conversation many times, as have my friends and people of my generation. It’s raw, emotional, and really spoke to me in just how there is no sugarcoating what is happening in the world.