In the late nineties when Mary Doria Russell’s first novel The Sparrow and its sequel Children of God were published, they and their author were highly acclaimed hits within the science fiction world, with The Sparrow winning the Arthur C. Clarke Award and Children of God being nominated for the Hugo Award. Movie adaptions were in the works for The Sparrow twice—once with Universal starring Antonio Banderas, and once with Warner Bros. starring Brad Pitt—but both times, the studios eventually halted production. Since then, The Sparrow seems to have fallen off the grid a bit. I picked it up a few years ago from my step-mother’s bookshelf, and it has since been my favorite novel. But I have yet to meet another person who has read or even heard of it. Perhaps this is because Russell’s novels were thrust too wholeheartedly into the relatively small world of science fiction readers, a world that their themes, characters, and sweeping narratives are entirely too significant to be held to.
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The Sparrow opens in Rome, on the desolate life of Emilio Sandoz: priest, whore, child killer. Emilio has just returned from a Jesuit mission to the newly-discovered planet of Rakhat, of which he is the only survivor. The Father General, Vincenzo Giuliani, along with a team of other priests, attempt to piece together the series of events on Rakhat and the reasons that the mission went bad, their efforts constantly slowed by the bitterness and despairing rigidity of the disgraced Father Sandoz.
Flashback forty years, and we encounter Sandoz again: humanitarian, wise-cracker, avid baseball fan. He is surrounded by close and loving friends. Anne and George Edwards: physician, engineer, spirited agnostics; Jimmy Quinn: astronomer, discoverer of worlds, redheaded Irish Catholic; D.W. Yarborough: Texan, pilot, homosexual; Sofia Mendes: rationalist, Sephardic Jew, former child prostitute. By luck, or chance, or fate, their lives are brought together as they embark on a groundbreaking journey into space.
The events that mark the transformation from a lively band of adventurers to a small, ruined man in a hospital in Italy are trivial, however, compared to the theological and emotional milestones that the novel itself tackles through whip-smart dialogue and tender moments between friends. The respect Russell has for the lives of her characters goes beyond the expected, and each individual is made memorable by poignant realism, honesty, and eloquence. They come up against philosophical as well as personal conflicts. “I do what I do without hope of reward or fear of punishment. I do not require Heaven or Hell to bribe or scare me into acting decently,” exclaims a frustrated Anne, faced with the implication that a person without religion would consequently be without morals, and each of the characters deal with everything from faith and morality to masturbation and sexuality with humor, confusion, and grace. And throughout it all, Sandoz asks again and again the timeless question, what are we who put our hope and our belief in God to do with the problem of evil in our world (and, in this case, in others)?
The Sparrow is the kind of book in which theme surpasses plot—an incredibly admirable writing skill—and yet the plot is, at the same time, vitally important to Russell’s message. Its title is taken from Matthew 10:29, “Not one sparrow can fall to the ground without your Father knowing it.” But as Father Felipe Reyes observes, “The sparrow still falls.” This anguished perspective is met by a ray of hope in the sequel, Children of God. Russell’s vision is incomplete without the capstone of the sequel, but if you only have time for one, The Sparrow is well worth the read on its own.
Its epic forty-year account ties together aliens, spaceships, the Vatican, and the unbearable capacity and magnitude of the human heart.