“The redemptive power of suffering is, in my experience at least, vastly overrated.” Over this past weekend, I finally got the chance to read Mary Doria Russell’s The Sparrow, and, while it becomes a dark journey indeed for Emilio Sandoz, our Jesuit protagonist, over the course of the novel, I heartily recommend it. In fact, it’s probably the best science-fiction book I’ve read since Perdido Street Station (although Russell’s book is much less phantasmagoric than Mieville’s more fantasy-tinged stuff.)
A former paleo-anthropologist and academic jack-of-all-trades, Russell has retold the standard First Contact type of story here with a blend of straight-up hard sci-fi, Columbian commentary, and devastating ruminations on the price of faith and the laws of unintended consequences. While the story here seemed self-contained, I’m now rather looking forward to picking up her sequel, Children of God (although the reading queue is pretty backed up right now.) At any rate, if you like your sci-fi literate, intelligent, and ultimately somewhat nightmarish, think about checking out The Sparrow. Update: You can read the first chapter here. Also, if you haven’t read The Sparrow, stay out of the comments, where the end of the book is being discussed.
I really liked The Sparrow as well. Children of God was good, but not as good. Here’s my problem, though, with the plotting of the Sparrow (and I may have the details wrong, as it’s been years since I read it..):
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Sandoz’s crisis of faith comes after he is tortured. This never made sense to me – he’s a trained Jesuit priest; how could ‘mere’ torture shake his faith, given what he knows about the history of Christianity and how so many have been tortured for their faith? I was just not persuaded that such a devout (and trained!) priest would lose his faith like that, and since it was such a crucial plot point, it diminished the book a bit for me.
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Yeah, that’s a solid point, although some of the other priests do remind him that Jesuits have gone through a lot of suffering in the past (I remember they bring up Isaac Jogues in the New World.) I took it that it wasn’t so much the rape and torture that broke him (although, Lord knows, it didn’t help) as the choices that came before and after – that it had been his spiritual hubris that had led the party to their deaths on Rakhat, that it had been his linguistic misunderstanding of hasta’akala that had led to the mutilation of his (and his fellow priest’s) hands, that he had spent years fighting to keep his vow of celibacy despite his love for Sofia, only to have it taken from him in the alien zoo-harem, and that it had been God’s final joke on him that he accidentally killed Askama (the alien translator girl) when he finally tried to rush the door. All in all, it’s a pretty bad hand to be dealt, particularly when you consider that Sandoz says he’s a priest for situational circumstances (due to his growing up in Puerto Rican slums) rather than out of any sense of God’s love.
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He does not lose faith because of the torture. He loses faith because at the beginning of the journey it seemed that it was a divinely inspired quest. It seemed that god brought them there, And Sandoz beleived that, even until he was raped. When he saw Hlavin Kitheri (after his friends had died, his hands had been ruined, and he had knowingly eaten babies) he thought that maybe it had not all been in vain, because here he was, standing in front of the singer, the reason they came. He thought that he was still in gods hands, and then the singer raped him. That is what sandoz says made him lose faith. It is kind of ironic, that he wrote songs about it, songs that were heard back on earth, though the only earthling who would have understood them, was the subject of the songs.