Book Review/Thoughts: The Sparrow
I just finished "The Sparrow", by Mary Doria Russel. It was this month's book for our local SF Reader's club, and it was very much the sort of book I'd pretty much never pick up to read on my own, which is why I like our local SF Reader's club, because it has a good cross-section of genre fans and, thus, a wide selection of books outside my usual preferred range. Sometimes, I am reminded why I really don't like books in a particular genre/style/tone... and other times, my horizons are broadened. In Lizard's opinion, a hundred crappy books are worth one great one... that is, I don't mind a large number of misses if I get even one hit.
So it is with "The Sparrow".
Read on for the full details!
Stripped to its barest essentials, the Sparrow is a story of a group of religious missionaries who make first contact with an alien race... and things don't go well. And if, reading that, you yawn, and think you've read it all before and you can give me every story beat from that description alone.. well, you're most likely wrong, because this novel dodges all of the easy outs, the cliches, the tropes we've seen a dozen times before.
The novel is written in a flashback/flashforward style. There are two time periods, basically -- the "present", the year 2060, when the lone survivor of the first contact mission has returned to Earth, and the "past", going from 2017 onwards, detailing the discovery of life on a world (Rakhat) orbiting Alpha Centauri, the decision by a group of mostly-Jesuits to mount a privately funded, clandestine mission there, and the consequences thereof. We know, in essence, how the story "ends" within the first few pages, so there's no spoilers here: Everyone but Emilio Sandez dies, Emilio returns physically and psychologically mutilated, and the initial reports from the expedition which found and rescued him indicates he's done some Very Bad Things, including the bare-handed murder of an innocent, young, native child in full view of his rescuers.
What follows, thus, is how we got there. There are no lies, tricks, or deceptions -- nothing described in the opening chapters turns out to be a dream, a hoax, or an imaginary story. There is, of course, a tremendous amount of context to it all, and when it's over, it all makes terrible, horrible, sense.
As a fairly minor side note, the technology involved in getting to Alpha Centauri is plausible (perhaps more so, in terms of progress, when the story was written in 1996 vs. now), and there's no serious eye-rollers on the hardware side, at least for me. It should also be noted, fairly strongly, that this isn't a story for hardware fetishists; Ms. Russell knows her science well enough to explain the important bits and then get the blinkenlights out of the way. This is fundamentally a human story, a story of emotions, ideas, values, and personalities, and by that I do not mean it could be any run-of-the-mill mainstream novel gussied up with a few aliens. It's science fiction in its purest and greatest form -- a means of telling a story that could not be told in any other way.
The inspiration for part of the story is obvious and openly stated by the author -- the first contact between Europeans and the natives of the Americas, and all that went wrong. While this is a horse which has beaten well past death, usually with so much PCness that even a freshman at Berkeley would roll their eyes, Ms. Russell avoids this pitfall. In her afterword, she notes that she doesn't think even our modern, "enlightened" age would do any better when contacting an alien culture, and that, really, is the heart and soul of the story. Her team of Jesuits and laypeople is not going to win souls by the sword, or to uplift the ignorant and unenlightened, or to bring back wealth and glory. They are going to learn and to understand, and there is no element of hypocrisy, treachery, or betrayal among the crew. All of the standard, tired, drivel we're used to -- the narrow-minded bigot, the greedy businessman, the fanatical fire-and-brimstone preacher -- is blessedly and utterly absent.
Saying too much more than that would be to give away a lot, undermining a large part of the enjoyment of the novel -- the slow (but not tedious, draggy, or overwritten) unfolding of the events which occurred on Rakhat, and how and why Father Sandoz ended up both the lone survivor and in the very dubious circumstances he was found in. It does not quite end on a cliffhanger, but there was room for a sequel and one has been written, which I have not yet read.
The writing is clean, descriptive, and instantly captivating. Descriptions of places, of atmosphere, of backgrounds, are all instantly evocative. The various characters are distinctly drawn and well developed, with multiple personality facets.
If I have a criticism, it is that the inhabitants of Rakhat seem far too blase about the fact there are aliens in their midst. Perhaps it's an attempt to show an alien mindset, but their reactions are very understated, and the general attitude is more that the Earthmen are a sort of amusing novelty than that they represent a fundamental shift in the understanding of the universe. Partially this can be explained by the nature of one of the cultures contacted, but I also noted that the characters themselves didn't wonder about it all that much, and that's a bit harder to justify.
This is somewhere below a minor quibble, though. "The Sparrow" is brilliantly written and deeply thought provoking, dealing with ideas about language, evolution, faith, sexuality, and the problems of 20/20 hindsight. "It should have all been so obvious..." has got to be the second-best epitath for the human race, right behind "It seemed like a good idea at the time."
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