Over at The Book Book, I’ve posted my recent review. This time around, the subject is Mary Doria Russell’s novel The Sparrow, first published in 1996.
Russell seems one of those novelists in the enviable position of writing whatever she wants, irrespective of genre. The Sparrow (and its 1998 sequel, Children of God) are frank science fiction. Since then, she has to my knowledge written no science fiction at all. Instead, she’s written a novel about Jews in World War II-era Italy; one about an unlikely participant in the 1921 Cairo Peace Conference; and, most recently, a Western/mystery about Doc Holliday. I mention this because (among other implications) it shows her to have a wide-ranging mind and an awareness of the importance of history — even in the writing of fiction.
In bare-bones form, The Sparrow‘s plot might be described thusly:
- We meet aliens.
- Some very pleasant and some very unpleasant things happen.
But there’s nothing bare-bones about the book. It’s well-researched. It’s well-written. It tugs in multiple directions at once — sympathy, laughter, wonder, horror. It provokes thought as well as sensation. When you turn the last page you may think (as I did): Damn. Now that was a read! It won numerous awards, and sold — continues to sell — quite well.
Yet somehow I’d managed to get through the last 15 years without ever hearing of it, or Russell,until Marta mentioned it and its sequel in an offhand comment back in January (with intriguing follow-up comments both from her and from a/b). Weird.
Anyhow, it’s great. Put aside any qualms you might harbor about science fiction or, for that matter, about theology. Brace yourself for confronting some of those very unpleasant things. And dive in.
marta says
I was going to ask if you were going to read the sequel, but then I read your review. Glad you’re going to read that too–and look forward to hearing your response.
It took me a few pages to warm to the story, but then I could not stop reading. And you’re right–she tells a lot, but I found what she had to tell us interesting. I went ahead and bought into the Catholic church thing because I just figured some event that we can’t know much imagine but must take place in the near future lead to the church having the position in the novel that it does. And it would be something along the lines of, say, our Revolutionary War. The war gave us the America we have today, but it isn’t like it comes up in conversation.
That was my reasoning. I’m sure she wanted to Catholic take on first contact and just went with it. But I loved Emilio.
John says
marta: You may have seen it already, but Russell’s Web site includes numerous interviews with her about the writing of The Sparrow and her other books. One I found especially interesting was by the National Jesuit News. My favorite question and answer:
Ha!
However she came to the decision to frame it all in the context of the Catholic Church, I thought it — especially the Jesuit angle — a brilliant solution to several problems at once. She speaks in interviews of the Jesuit tradition of being among the first to visit foreign lands, and of sympathetically documenting other cultures. So that works. But it also fixes a huge practical plot problem: who, aside from governments, could possibly afford to underwrite a first mission to another planet?
Emilio is a great character — complex, imperfect, alternately lovable and unlovable, funny…
Thanks so much for mentioning the book back in January.