The Sparrow

by Mary Doria Russell

Series: The Sparrow (1)

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Title	The Sparrow
Author	Mary Doria Russell
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Your review	Jesuits in space. The problem of faith. First alien contact. Celibacy and temptation, love, despair. Heavy stuff. Russell is using the science-fictional setting of first contact with an alien race to dramatise an age-old question: how can we reconcile the notion of a loving God with the existence of evil? If nothing can happen without God intending it to, how can a loving God intend bad things to happen? Now there's a fairly persistant anti-religious theme running through a lot of science fiction, and there are plenty of novels who answer that question by explicitly denying either the existence of the benevolence of God. There are also plenty of examples of the flip side, where the climax of the plot brings the hand of God explicitly into the picture and reveals the eventual reasonableness of His plan for us. (The sequel to The Sparrow, Children of God, takes this step, to my disappointment.) What I enjoy so much about The Sparrow is that it takes neither path. We get exactly what we get in this world: joy and sorrow and love and pain, and the opportunity to frame this with religious faith or religious despair. When I say "religious despair", I mean either "God doesn't exist and our existence is therefore meaningless" or "God exists and is malevolent or uncaring." The humanist option, finding meaning without God, isn't given any airtime, but this is a novel about faith and submission. The mission establishing first contact with aliens is a Jesuit mission (in itself a brilliant move, and one that seems almost inevitable when looked at historically), the central character is a Jesuit priest, and the exploration of faith is via his experiences. Those experiences (the bulk of the plot) are definitely of the faith-based variety. I won't summarise that portion of the plotline, because it would trivialise it, but I will say that the question of the benevolence of God is for that character far more than a theological point of argument. The whole plotline exists to place him in an extreme crisis of faith, and given that Russell obviously weighs in on the Catholic side for the answer, I think it's greatly to her credit that she leaves it as open as she does. (Although like I said, the sequel drops a clanger as reverberatory as the Hand of God blessing the atomic missile and blowing up all the bad dudes at the conclusion of Stephen King's The Stand. Oh, sorry, that should have come with a spoiler warning. Oh well, you just saved yourself six hours of buildup.) That for the theological theme, but there's more to like about the novel. The alien culture and biology is handled with a pleasantly light touch, free of info-dumps but with all the information we need whenever we need it. Like the religious theme, it steers a middle path between two clichés: the totally inscrutable and incomprehensible things, and the people-in-funny-costumes of Star Trek and similar. The aliens of The Sparrow have a different psychology and a very different sociology, but both we and the characters are nonetheless capable of identifying and sympathising with them. That the mission nonetheless ends in tragedy is not due to the fundamental impossibility of interspecies understanding, but comes down to luck and probability: there are too many possibilities for misunderstanding, despite all caution there are too many assumptions on both sides, and some of them turn out to be important. Again, it's a note-perfect extrapolation from so many real historical moments of cultural contact... only with tails and two opposable thumbs on each hand. There's another feature to The Sparrow which I enjoyed, but which is definitely open to criticism. The characters are, one and all, heroic. I don't mean that they are flawless, and I certainly don't mean that they are flat. But they have passions not emotions, and deep loves and abiding friendships not acquaintances, and so on. Even their jokes are faster and subtler and wittier and more self-deprecating than normal mortals attain. There's some defence for this. On the level of skills, I'm quite happy to accept that our central character is a supremely skilled linguist (in both the technical sense and the quantitative sense -- a guy who speaks fourteen languages idiomatically). He's on the mission partly for that reason, after all. The same, more or less, goes for the strength and depth of the religious feelings being described. It's important for the plot and for the themes Russell wants to explore, so sure, she can have it. What grates a little more is the personal saintliness of the characters, and the overbright character of their interactions. We're given shots of several dinner parties, apparently a nonstop stream of wisecracks and bonding, which on the one hand makes us love these characters so much more elemental than ourselves, but on the other hand bears a tragic resemblance to the scripted hilarity of a sitcom. Not that it's sitcom-level humour, but it's nonstop and extreme and therefore slightly unreal. This isn't necessarily a bad thing, but I dwell on it because it's likely to put some people off. Think of Captain Corelli's Mandolin, or Ender's Game, or anything by David Gemmell, or movies shot in technicolor. If these give you shivers (in conjunction, I mean, beyond their various individual failings) then The Sparrow probably isn't for you. If you can accept or enjoy the heroic, though, and if you're open-minded on (and interested in) theology, I recommend it. I don't know how obvious it will be from this review, but I'm an atheist myself. I enjoy God-bashing in fiction, and I enjoy religious fiction, but I dislike both when they assume they're on the right side rather than making a case for it. The Sparrow has an agenda, and one I happen to disagree with, but it's polite enough to leave it stated as an option, not as received truth. And in doing so, it delivers an intense and thought-provoking story. With tails and two opposable thumbs on each hand. I mean, that's got to count for something, right?
Other authors*
Publication	Ballantine Books (1997), Edition: Reissue, Paperback
Publication date	1997
ISBN	0449912558 / 9780449912553
LC classification 1	PS3568.U76678S63
Dewey 1	813/.54 22
Subjects	Jesuits › Fiction Life on other planets › Fiction Science fiction Science fiction. gsafd Twenty-first century › Fiction
Primary language eng	English
Secondary language	(blank)
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Date started
Date finished
Summary 1	The Sparrow by Mary Doria Russell (1997)
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BCID	XXX-
Number of copies	1
Citation	MLA, APA, Chicago/Turabian, Wikipedia citation
Data source	Amazon.com

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