NL: The Sparrow by Mary Doria Russell

This is the second book I've read for the NL (the first was Lamb by Christopher Moore, review here). The Sparrow, by Mary Doria Russell, is very different from that one.

God sees the sparrow's fall. But he neither stops nor cushions it. Nor does he temper the wind to the shorn lamb, who bears the same tempest as the rest. Everyone dies.

This isn't spoiling the book in any way. Not only are you primed for disaster from the first page (few phrases are more ominous than "They meant no harm") but from the beginning you know that Father Emilio Sandoz has suffered greatly, and that the rest of his expedition is dead. There is no suspense as to that; the suspense is what happened and why.

Russell's characters are all obsessed with God - or at least most of them are. To be fair, although Jimmy has his expectations of priests I don't think we ever see him worrying about God's existence, and George never manages to be a real person (all of the characters live in that peril; each is a stereotype (Earth Mother, broken genius, Seeker, caretaker, inquisitor, wise old mentor) and your reactions to them are meant to be a foregone conclusion (everyone loves Emilio, Sofia is desirable, Anne is your mother figure, Voelker is despicable); but most of them manage to achieve a three-dimensionality that allows you to forget how much "let's put a party together" there is in the assembling of the expedition, or how much "devil's advocate" is needed for the hearing). But they are minor characters: the major ones - Emilio, Anne, Sofia, DW, Marc, Giuliani, Behr, Candoni, even Voelker - all are God-obsessed in their own ways. "I liked you better when you didn't bring God into every damned conversation," Anne says at one point, but to no avail. God is dragged into every conversation, and in the end Anne must admit that she would believe in God if she were allowed to blame him when things go wrong. Russell wants this book to be an examination of faith and theodicy (the problem of evil).

I'm not entirely convinced she succeeds. But it's a valiant effort, marred mainly by her arguing from her premises. If you accept her premises - and you can't say you aren't told what they are from page one - you'll probably admire this book. If you don't, you may be like me, finding it fascinating but frustrating.

(I should probably say here that if you don't want the book spoiled you shouldn't read any further. The next couple of paragraphs are safe, in case your eye catches on them, but soon enough there will be spoilers.)

Because none of the characters are anthropologists they don't really explore the alien culture they encounter. Working only with a couple of linguists they take an enormous amount of time to learn the most basic facts, and give no thought to how their interactions are changing or damaging the culture they've come to "for the reason Jesuits have always gone to the farthest frontiers of human exploration... ad majorem Dei gloriam: for the greater glory of God." Despite the whole sorry history of human "exploration", they don't seem to worry about much. They do worry about whether they can survive, but not whether they will bring the equivalent of smallpox or measles. Nor do they seem overly concerned with cultural contamination, about which more later. For people who "went to learn", they seem ill-equipped to do so. And thus the disaster which overtakes them is indeed the result of a series of small decisions, each of which seemed right at the time. More than right - God-inspired. The political and economic conditions that allow them to pull off the trip fall so neatly into line the characters can be forgiven for thinking God is on their side.

I'll add that setting things in the near future is always a gamble. When the book was written, the 2013 scenes were a generation away; now they're almost on us. By the novel's timeline, there should (by now) have been four Kurdish wars, and the last one should have caused the total collapse of Turkey. This and other things which are now in the past (but never happened) - particularly the development of the "bond servant" industry which makes commodities of Third World children and the asteroid miners who provide the space ship for the journey - force the reader to treat the novel as a parallel-world novel instead of straight science fiction, but that shouldn't be a problem.

More problematic for me were the things that never did change. In 2062 the Catholic Church is still a power player, still important even in the US, and still clinging to all of its current beliefs - particularly the sex-related ones (this book is almost obsessed with the Church's attitude towards sex): celibate priests, birth-control, the all male priesthood, the vicious condemnation of any sexual "aberrancy" from being gay to being a prostitute, even one forced into it as a child. At one point, a priest wonders why rape seems worse to him than prostitution (which in the context of the conversation was referring to prostitution in order to survive); another priest answers that it is perhaps because "prostitution" implies choice and control. The Church can't cede control to individuals, in anything but especially in sex, and I think Russell intends obliquely to condemn that attitude. But it is so oblique that I could be wrong. Certainly, only one of the main characters is depicted as promiscuous by choice (Jimmy doesn't count, he's young, lay, and unmarried, and anyway all we see of him is his attempt to woo Sofia): the Canadian priest Marc, and he's not supposed to be and it gets him into trouble. But the others are all driven by their unrequited love/lust for others: Sofia for Emilio, Anne for Emilio, Emilio for Sofia, DW for Emilio ... Jimmy by his love of Sofia and jealousy of Emilio ... and Sofia by her tormented past as a child prostitute. They can't turn around without tripping over sex.

Or Emilio.

Of course, he's the main character of the novel, the one whose journey toward God is being chronicled. But still, I didn't find him nearly as funny and charming as all the characters in the book did; a minor problem easily overcome. But he is at the heart of the story - who he is and what happens to him. And why it happens.

And this is where I finally part company with the author. For her, all of the terrible things that happen to Emilio happen because God willed it - Deus vult, in fact, becomes the terrible catchphrase the characters throw at each other, first humorously and then - after the first death - viciously. Why does everyone die? Why is Emilio subjected to rape, of soul as well as body? Why? Deus vult, and not ironically either. God has a purpose and let the chips fall where they may...

While I was reading The Sparrow I kept thinking of other things I'd read. When they go chasing off after the singers whose music calls to them across space, I of course thought of the Sirens and the Lorelei. When we got our first intimation that the singer would "undo" Emilio, I remembered the line from Terry Pratchett's Lords and Ladies: "We remembered that they sang; but we forgot the words." When Marc introduces the concept of gardening - with the foreshadowing of Saapuri's treatment of it as purely a scent-creating place - I thought of a novel (I can't remember which one, or by whom) where the protagonists introduce the horse-collar and destroy the established civilization. Marc's gardens do the same on Rakhat.

I also thought of something a friend said recently about birds of prey: "Raptors get no respect. You never see a gang of rabbits chasing away a fox." When Sofia rallies the Runa to fight the Jana'ata, tragedy results, and although when the UN team arrives that tragedy's aftermath is still playing itself out, I don't doubt that the Jana'ata will feel compelled to slaughter all the contaminated Runa and resettle with stock from too far away. Things will be good for a time for those new Runa, until their numbers reach the desired amount...

And this brings me to another argument I would have with these people. The Runa are not the slaves of the Jana'ata. This isn't the Belgian Congo, or any other place or time where one group of humans treats another like livestock. When Emilio attempts to explain the dynamic, or at least as much of it as he has managed to learn, he's challenged: "Are you defending them?" He's not, of course, but for many people an explanation is a defense (think of today's politics, where any attempt to discuss what America's foreign policy looks like to others is met with accusations of hating America). But more than that: why do the Jana'ata need defending? They are, I would say, 'as God made them'. They aren't humans. They are what they are.

Here again I was reminded of something else: Alan Dean Foster's Cachalot, which postulates that Earth's cetaceans have a social structure based on the food chain, in which the great baleen whales are the lowest and least regarded, and the toothed whales higher because they eat living prey, and the orcas the highest of all because they eat the others - as they should. (The novel's plot revolves around the betrayal and rage felt by the whales when humans renounce their killing of whales, thus revealing themselves to be not the ultimate alpha of the seas but instead almost the lowest only pretending to be top dogs.) Also I was reminded of Quark's complaint to Sisko in Deep Space 9: "You Federation humans -- you're always preaching tolerance. But you only practice it with those whose cultures you approve of."

The Jana'ata treated Emilio and the others the only way they knew how: within the context of their own culture. The Jesuit team went there, intruded, patronized, and destroyed, and then were destroyed in turn because of their ignorance. Should the Jana'ata have treated Emilio like some prey animal with a special grace? What else could they have thought he was, especially given that the humans lived among the Runa? But whether they erred with him or not, their relationship with the Runa had been created over millions of years. And, if you buy the underlying theory, it was created by God.

"God draws straight with crooked lines" is a favorite saying of those to whom everything that happens is part of God's mysterious plan. He works in mysterious ways His wonders to perform. The bodily destruction of Emilio is meant to be his path to sainthood. But are the Jana'ata to blame for being a line God made crooked? No Jesus (as far as we are aware) ever walked Rakhat preaching the equivalent of lion lying down with lamb to the lions.

In the end, The Sparrow is a fascinating failure. It's tightly-plotted and well-written, with (mostly) interesting characters - and she does us the favor of telling us upfront that virtually all of them will die, so we aren't crushed when it happens - and the device of parallel stories works very well. I don't think the book would be have as engaging told in strictly linear progression: our gradual penetration of the mystery along with the priests conducting the hearing works, but we'd be too impatient if we already knew it. Where it falls down, for me, is that Russell does, in the end, accept that God has the right to do whatever he wants with us - to kill so many to make a saint of Emilio Sandoz. (Again, a comparison came to me: the invasion of Earth in Signs just to restore the wavering faith of one man.) There is no true evil because it all redounds ad majorem Dei gloriam.

Deus vult. That is all ye know, and all ye need to know.