"No. He watches. He rejoices. He weeps. He observes the moral drama of human life and gives meaning to it by caring passionately about us, and remembering."
"Matthew ten, verse twenty-nine," Vincenzo Giuliani said quietly. "'Not one sparrow can fall to the ground without your Father knowing it.'"
"But the sparrow still falls," Felipe said.
Well, this is the quickest I've ever got to fifty. All in all, I'd trade this year's fast pace for not having a deadly pandemic, but here we are.
Mary Doria Russell's The Sparrow is about the first mission to make contact with a newly discovered alien species, only the catch is this: it's not the governments of the world who send the mission, but the Society of Jesus, or Jesuits, who get the jump on everyone else. The heart of the mission is a Puerto Rican Jesuit priest and linguist named Emilio Sandoz, who undertakes the mission secretly with the help of a ragtag crew. The novel works in flashback, beginning when Sandoz is captured on the alien planet of Rakhat and sent back to Earth as the most hated man in the universe, a prostitute and murderer, and the only member of the mission to survive. The central question the novel withholds is, how did a mission of Christian love go so wrong?
This novel really ought to be right up my alley. In fact, I selected it for my 50th because I thought I would love it, but I didn't. The first 300 pages or so are all prelude, as we see Sandoz connect with the group of loved ones who will become his fellow missionaries/astronauts: a beautiful Jewish programmer, a Texan pilot, an eager young radio operator, an older couple who serve as surrogate parents. That Sandoz's friends and relations turn out to have discrete and necessary skills for the mission is described as a kind of fate, a suggestion that God has blessed and arranged the mission. And the novel works hard, too hard, to establish the connection between these characters, mostly with bad jokes and scenes of bonhomie that mostly made me impatient to get into space.
Once the mission gets to Rakhat, things improve: Doria Russell, who I believe is an anthropologist, describes a stratified society where two species are locked in a cultural state of predator-prey dependency: the more developed Jana'ata keep the simpler Runa as contracted gatherers and servants. The missionaries befriend both species, and Sandoz works his linguistic magic so they can converse, but the introduction of humans threatens the ancient arrangement. As with a lot of science fiction, my principal reaction was that the aliens aren't weird enough: what are the chances that life on other planets is bipedal, or capitalist, or has a language humans are able to reproduce with speech? I can get on board with Star Trek, but it seems to me a novel about the challenges first contact loses some credibility when aliens look and talk so much like us.
Doria Russell make several allusions to earlier Jesuit missions of the kind that accompanied European colonists in the New World. Maybe it's just because I read Fathers and Crows, but I think it's hard to look at those Jesuits with anything but contempt. Sandoz and company don't try to convert the people of Rakhat; their intentions are only to learn. But it seems to me there's a puzzling lack of thought about the destabilizing presence of humans, given what the Jesuits and colonizers of the early modern era did to human communities. In The Sparrow, it's the introduction of food gardens that spark violence, giving the friendly Runa the excess energy to reproduce without Jana'ata permission. I mean, who could have thought that planting species from another planet might have long-reaching effects?
But that gets to what I felt was the larger failing of The Sparrow. Like the Jesuit colonizers, it has a severe lack of interest in how first contact might affect the contacted, and chooses to focus on the consequences for the colonizers instead. The pain that becomes the focus of the novel is Sandoz's, having returned from Rakhat in a ruined state both physically and psychologically. The metaphor of the sparrow is applied to his own suffering, but if there are rippling effects on Rakhat of the Jesuits' actions, the novel isn't interested in them except as facets of Sandoz's guilt. That didn't work for me.
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