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frazzle 's review for:
The Sparrow
by Mary Doria Russell
A story about a Jesuit mission to an alien planet is not something I would usually gravitate towards (space joke). Sci-fi usually fluctuates between boring and baffling to me, but I tried to keep an open mind for the sake of my book club.
The first hundred or so pages I quite enjoyed - pretty strong character development, believable scientific developments surrounding the discovery of extraterrestrial life (singers from Alpha Centuri), and engagement with theological and anthropological questions that posed.
I didn't quite buy the motivation this group of friends supposedly had for making the 35-earth-year journey to reach this planet. Evangelism didn't seem to be one of them (apparently the Jesuits aren't fussed about that), some vague exploratory spirit perhaps? Really it just seemed like galactic equivalent of the squad piling into the minibus for a weekend away camping.
Even their initial arrival on the planet and first encounter with the creatures there I found relatively interesting. The first group they met were herbivorous in every sense, almost comically guileless and Edenic. However, the second group, the more human-like (in character if not in body), were obsessed with trade and social status and undertook mass slaughter of babies for reasons of social convenience.
But for me the pace really slowed when we started to get into the weeds of the aliens' lineages and interactions with each other, stuff that was neither central to our understanding of the humans (which is ultimately what sci-fi is about, right?) nor fun to read.
I completely commend the author's earnestness to include theological takes on things, and she'd certainly done her homework about Christianity and Judaism. But unfortunately I found a bit of it a little lightweight. Theodicy is obviously a pretty gnarly subject, and I found Russell's response to this was to tell rather than show - to have characters call out naive ascriptions of good to God, and evil to creatures. I felt like saying, Yes, but then what?
The parallel between this book and Endo's 'Silence' is not lost on me - I don't just read books about missionary expeditions to foreign lands, promise! For what it's worth, I found Endo's the far more convincing account of the existential crises and personal struggles the missionary vocation can entail.
The first hundred or so pages I quite enjoyed - pretty strong character development, believable scientific developments surrounding the discovery of extraterrestrial life (singers from Alpha Centuri), and engagement with theological and anthropological questions that posed.
I didn't quite buy the motivation this group of friends supposedly had for making the 35-earth-year journey to reach this planet. Evangelism didn't seem to be one of them (apparently the Jesuits aren't fussed about that), some vague exploratory spirit perhaps? Really it just seemed like galactic equivalent of the squad piling into the minibus for a weekend away camping.
Even their initial arrival on the planet and first encounter with the creatures there I found relatively interesting. The first group they met were herbivorous in every sense, almost comically guileless and Edenic. However, the second group, the more human-like (in character if not in body), were obsessed with trade and social status and undertook mass slaughter of babies for reasons of social convenience.
But for me the pace really slowed when we started to get into the weeds of the aliens' lineages and interactions with each other, stuff that was neither central to our understanding of the humans (which is ultimately what sci-fi is about, right?) nor fun to read.
I completely commend the author's earnestness to include theological takes on things, and she'd certainly done her homework about Christianity and Judaism. But unfortunately I found a bit of it a little lightweight. Theodicy is obviously a pretty gnarly subject, and I found Russell's response to this was to tell rather than show - to have characters call out naive ascriptions of good to God, and evil to creatures. I felt like saying, Yes, but then what?
The parallel between this book and Endo's 'Silence' is not lost on me - I don't just read books about missionary expeditions to foreign lands, promise! For what it's worth, I found Endo's the far more convincing account of the existential crises and personal struggles the missionary vocation can entail.