“Matthew ten, verse twenty-nine,” Vincenzo Giuliani said quietly. “Not one sparrow can fall to the ground without your Father knowing it.”The Sparrow is an odd book to classify: While technically science fiction, the scifi aspects were the least important elements (and to be fair, perhaps the least plausible). According to author Mary Doria Russell, her intent was (after musing on the 500th anniversary of Columbus “discovering” America) to, “write a story that put modern, sophisticated, resourceful, well-educated, and well-meaning people in the same position as those early explorers and missionaries – a position of radical ignorance.” To this end, she sends a group of Jesuits (and a few laymen) to investigate the source of beautiful singing being broadcast from a planet in Alpha Centauri – not to baptise or to enslave or to steal the gold from its inhabitants but to, with the wisdom that hindsight must have instilled in modern humans, make first contact for the noblest of reasons.
“But the sparrow still falls.”
The Jesuit scientists went to learn, not to proselytize. They went so that they might come to know God's other children. The went for the reason Jesuits have always gone to the farthest frontiers of human exploration. They went ad majorem Dei gloriam: for the greater glory of God.Because Russell is an anthropologist, this contact is really very interesting – with especial attention paid to linguistics as a reflection of culture – but even more intriguing than this journey to the stars is the spiritual journey of Emelio Sandoz. Although the cast of characters is rather large, Sandoz is the main character, and as a Jesuit of imperfect faith, the philosophical implications of first contact, as seen through his eyes, is the main point of this book (and why the scifi elements seem beside the point; merely a framework).
They meant no harm.
The structure of The Sparrow makes for a suspenseful read: Alternating between the present day (2060, in which Sandoz is the physically and mentally destroyed sole survivor of the mission – not a spoiler, it's the first thing we learn) and 2019 (when the singing from the planet Rakhat is first heard), with both narratives heading towards the convergence of the timelines and the events that broke Sandoz. In 2060, Sandoz is being cared for by the Jesuits, and because the effects of relativity (while approaching the speed of light during space travel) caused him to age only a few years relative to the four decades that passed on Earth while he was gone, the current Father General of the Society, though an old man now, was a year behind Sandoz in seminary and knew him then as “God's best beloved”. In the timeline that begins in 2019 (with some flashbacks to even earlier events), Sandoz is a priest in a Puerto Rican slum whose closest friends eventually make up the non-Jesuit complement of the space mission. And while it might seem “convenient” that this priest is chummy with an Astrophysicist, an AI specialist, a Doctor, and an Engineer, that's rather the point: at every step along the way (from the special linguistics training that Sandoz has received to the vast Jesuit wealth and centralised decision-making that allows them to bypass the byzantine bureaucracy that delays an official UN-backed mission to Rakhat), Sandoz sees the ease of each step as a sign from God; like finding turtles on fenceposts and knowing that someone must have put them there. It is precisely because of Sandoz's growing mysticism in the past timeline that the reader is eager to discover the events that led to this statement in the future:
“That is my dilemma. Because if I was led by God to love God, step by step, as it seemed, if I accept that the beauty and the rapture were real and true, the rest of it was God’s will too, and that, gentlemen, is cause for bitterness. But if I am simply a deluded ape who took a lot of old folktales far too seriously, then I brought all this on myself and my companions and the whole business becomes farcical, doesn’t it. The problem with atheism, I find, under these circumstances," he continued with academic exactitude, each word etched on the air with acid, "is that I have no one to despise but myself. If, however, I choose to believe that God is vicious, then at least I have the solace of hating God.”The Sparrow is a very interesting book, but as this is the first novel of a former academic, the writing isn't top shelf – there are implausible and insupportable situations and too many shallow characters with inscrutable motivations – but that's not to say that I didn't enjoy my time spent in this world. I'd rate it a 3.5 with caveats and am rounding down because of them, but I am also looking forward to picking up the sequel and reentering Russell's universe.
