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The Sparrow by Mary Doria Russell
Dec. 19th, 2015 01:41 pmThe Sparrow: A Novel (The Sparrow series)
4/5. The lone survivor of the first Jesuit mission (get it?) to Alpha Centauri makes it home and tells his story to a largely hostile audience.
I have mixed feelings about the Jesuit community, which I bring up because it quite neatly parallels my feelings on this book. For reasons, I know a lot of Jesuits – actual priests, I mean – and they are in general the sort of excellent people who thrive more the harder the work is, and who treat Ph.D.'s like a nice lark but okay where's the next one. On the other hand, I received healthcare from a Jesuit institution for several years, underwritten by a Jesuit-held insurance policy, and well. The misogyny embedded in that policy impacted my life in an incredibly expensive and painful way. So yeah. Love the people, still really, really angry at the institution. Except institutions are people – we like to pretend they're not, but they are – so it's complicated.
Anyway, this is a book about finding transcendence – in hard work beautifully done, in found family, in God – and then watching it all fall unto so much dust. So, kind of painful, then. I love good writing about transcendence, which this definitely is. Personally, my moments of transcendence are found in hard work beautifully done, in music, and in endurance sports, except as an atheist I like to be alone with myself in those moments, whereas several of the characters in this book are reaching for God.
So this book is beautiful, and wonderful, and funny, and sad. But I have mixed feelings, because this book is confronting trauma, and how awful it Is to be a trauma survivor who has been trained to believe that everything happens for a reason. And I think that ultimately this book leans too hard on the bystander perspective of people who weren't fucking there, and who didn't go through it, and who are, in the way of bystanders, really really eager to assign a comfortable reason and meaning for it all, and to impose that narrative on the survivor who doesn't want it. All of this framed in explicitly religious narratives (along with a lot of more or less poisonous general notions about the survivors of rape and prostitution). And this book is challenging these narratives, but only to a point. But maybe this is the point where my atheism gets in the way. Maaaaaaybe.
Also, I dearly wish the twist of vicious social commentary in this book had been drawn out further. Russell makes it explicit once and only once that, in judging this alien culture, we are failing to look in the mirror first. And given that this book is at its heart about predators – alien, many of the humans in Sophia's life, providence from Emilio's perspective at certain points – the congruences could have been more sharply drawn. It would have been a more obvious book, and an angrier one. But it would have brought out the . . . parable buried in the science fiction elements, and I think that actually would have been a benefit.
Anyway, I'll be thinking about this for a while. And I suspect when I read it again, I will have to think all over again.
4/5. The lone survivor of the first Jesuit mission (get it?) to Alpha Centauri makes it home and tells his story to a largely hostile audience.
I have mixed feelings about the Jesuit community, which I bring up because it quite neatly parallels my feelings on this book. For reasons, I know a lot of Jesuits – actual priests, I mean – and they are in general the sort of excellent people who thrive more the harder the work is, and who treat Ph.D.'s like a nice lark but okay where's the next one. On the other hand, I received healthcare from a Jesuit institution for several years, underwritten by a Jesuit-held insurance policy, and well. The misogyny embedded in that policy impacted my life in an incredibly expensive and painful way. So yeah. Love the people, still really, really angry at the institution. Except institutions are people – we like to pretend they're not, but they are – so it's complicated.
Anyway, this is a book about finding transcendence – in hard work beautifully done, in found family, in God – and then watching it all fall unto so much dust. So, kind of painful, then. I love good writing about transcendence, which this definitely is. Personally, my moments of transcendence are found in hard work beautifully done, in music, and in endurance sports, except as an atheist I like to be alone with myself in those moments, whereas several of the characters in this book are reaching for God.
So this book is beautiful, and wonderful, and funny, and sad. But I have mixed feelings, because this book is confronting trauma, and how awful it Is to be a trauma survivor who has been trained to believe that everything happens for a reason. And I think that ultimately this book leans too hard on the bystander perspective of people who weren't fucking there, and who didn't go through it, and who are, in the way of bystanders, really really eager to assign a comfortable reason and meaning for it all, and to impose that narrative on the survivor who doesn't want it. All of this framed in explicitly religious narratives (along with a lot of more or less poisonous general notions about the survivors of rape and prostitution). And this book is challenging these narratives, but only to a point. But maybe this is the point where my atheism gets in the way. Maaaaaaybe.
Also, I dearly wish the twist of vicious social commentary in this book had been drawn out further. Russell makes it explicit once and only once that, in judging this alien culture, we are failing to look in the mirror first. And given that this book is at its heart about predators – alien, many of the humans in Sophia's life, providence from Emilio's perspective at certain points – the congruences could have been more sharply drawn. It would have been a more obvious book, and an angrier one. But it would have brought out the . . . parable buried in the science fiction elements, and I think that actually would have been a benefit.
Anyway, I'll be thinking about this for a while. And I suspect when I read it again, I will have to think all over again.
