Rating: 3/5, average
TW: sexual assault
If this book wasn’t chosen for book club, I would have never picked it up. I’m Jewish and not terribly religious, so when I hear a book is about Catholic priests, I’m immediately turned off. I got in the habit of tuning out Christian stuff by skipping out on Christmas plays in elementary school. On the other hand, this is a first contact story with religious themes, so I was kind of intrigued…
The Sparrow is about a Jesuit mission to an alien planet called Rakhat. The main characters are Emilio, a Cuban Jesuit priest, Jimmy, a physicist at SETI, Anne, a friend and pupil of Emilio’s, and Sofia, a Sephardic Jewish computer scientist. We’re told right from the beginning that horrible, scarring things happened to Emilio and everybody else died. The narrative is woven between the thread of Emilio’s recovery post-mission and the thread of time leading up to and including the mission.
I was trying to decide whether or not I wanted to read this and I saw an interview where the author implied the book was an apologia for Christopher Columbus:
“The idea came to me in the summer of 1992 as we were celebrating the 500th anniversary of Columbus’s arrival in the New World. There was a great deal of historical revisionism going on as we examined the mistakes made by Europeans when they first encountered foreign cultures in the Americas and elsewhere. It seemed unfair to me for people living at the end of the twentieth century to hold those explorers and missionaries to standards of sophistication and tolerance that we hardly manage even today.”
I felt like this had a really strong political background, but I had a hard time figuring out what exactly it was. The reason I kept reading The Sparrow was that I was interested in trying to piece together her political and religious ideology. Mary Doria Russell was brought up as a Catholic but left the Church when was she was fifteen and converted to Judaism later in life. She doesn’t really fit in the conservative or liberal boxes. She seems generally pro-colonist, but recognizes the harm that can come from reckless colonization. She seems to lean neo-liberal, and she uses a lot of racial stereotypes in her writing, though not in an intentionally negative way. I think she’s trying to be descriptive rather than racist but a lot of her generalizations fall into a gray area between racist and not racist.
There were a lot of weird racial comments, like that the Japanese are gamblers. I’ve never heard of that. I tried looking it up and all I got were articles about pachinko. She was saying that based on their history of attacking Pearl Harbor and trying to become an empire that they like to gamble. I’m not sure about that… She also kept making references to Emilio’s double ancestry as mestizo, where the “indigenous” side would come out at some times and the “Spanish” side at others and it was quite awkward… and then Sofia goes “home” to Israel to relax after finishing her assignment despite not having lived there before. Sofia is characterized as overly practical and intellectual, which seems like a Jewish stereotype (though it’s not without base…). She’s kind of autistic-coded, which makes me wonder if Jews in general tend to be autistic-coded (Spock-type?).
There’s also a heavy dose of white-saviorism. La Perla in Puerto Rico is portrayed as an irredeemable slum where Anne and George can only hope to save a few people:
“Before they could react, he [Emilio] told them about La Perla, in stark statistical detail. He had no illusions and refused to let the Edwardses harbor any. All they could hope for was a chance of salvaging a few lives out of the thousands of souls cramming the slum.”
This passage is a really weird mixture of recognition of other religions and colonialism:
“Unbidden, the thought came. Rabbis marry. Ministers marry. And he told himself that, yes, if he were a rabbi or a minister, he would love her as a whole man and thank God for her every day. And if he were an Aztec, he thought ruthlessly, he’d cut the hearts from the living breasts of his enemies and offer blood to the sun. And if he were Tibetan, he’d spin prayer wheels. But he was none of those things. He was a Jesuit, and his path was different.”
There’s also the odd assumption that innovation can only exist in a stratified society:
“’Mass communications,’ Anne suggested. ‘And a segment of the population with the leisure to sit around thinking up wave theories. So: probably a stratified society with economic divisions.”
Feels like capitalist conditioning.
I kept looking for what the story had to do with Columbus, but it seems to be closer to what happened to Isaac Jogues, a Jesuit priest who was mutilated and killed by Mohawk Indians in Canada. Maybe Mary Doria Russell set out to apologize for Columbus, but instead she found the story of Isaac Jogues and decided to make an allegory for that because he was a more sympathetic colonist? Columbus is mentioned only once in the text:
“There were no Taino or Arawak or Carib historians, but there was certainly conflict in the Caribbean. Both before and after the arrival of Columbus.”
Other than that, Emilio’s story is much more similar to Isaac Jogues’s than Columbus’s. Isaac Jogues is a Jesuit priest who goes to a foreign world to convert the natives and gets martyred. Columbus was primarily looking for East Indian gold and enslaved the natives in an attempt to attain that gold. I feel a little bit tricked—I was expecting an apologia for Columbus but I got a hagiography of some missionary I’d never heard of and whose legacy wasn’t in need of restoration. Yes, colonization was dangerous for the colonizers as well, but their suffering pales in comparison to that of the natives, who lost 90% of their total population due to slavery, disease, and violence. Pointing out one historical instance where a Catholic priest was the victim instead of the oppressor doesn’t really change the general flow of oppression from white people to indigenous people.
Ignoring for a second the questionable politics, it’s a decently well-written book. The characters are memorable, the plot makes sense, and the aliens are satisfyingly alien. I really liked Anne. She’s blunt, funny, and honest. I don’t know if I’ve ever read a “dirty old woman” character before, but I kind of liked it (lol). She is an author self-insert, but that’s not a bad thing as long as the author’s personality is interesting. If I had any critiques of her, it seemed odd that Jimmy would like her so much that he would call her before his mother when he found an alien message (it’s a common problem with self-insert characters that they’re unusually beloved by the rest of the cast).
I was less impressed with the religious themes. It spends a long time on the problem of evil but it doesn’t come to much of a conclusion except “God has a higher plan” and “sometimes you can feel God”. The first is appeal to authority and the second is appeal to emotion and neither of them feel like solid proof (to me at least). The narrative remarks often that things are going according to God’s plan, but it’s pretty easy to show that happening in a book written by an author who is actively trying to give that impression. Horrible things happen to Emilio, but it’s all in God’s plan: “Not one sparrow can fall to the ground without your Father knowing it.”
This is a bit of a spoiler, but it’s heavily hinted at in the beginning… Emilio gets raped and has his hands mutilated by the aliens. This book was being written in the 90s, around the same time Catholic Church sexual abuse cases started to receive wide media attention. She alludes to this through Emilio’s thoughts: “[There were priests] who denied that they felt desire and split their lives: paragons in the light, predators in the dark.” I kept wondering, “What’s behind the decision to make a fictional Catholic priest get raped?” Isaac Jogues was tortured, but not raped. There may have been Catholic priests who were raped, but I’m not aware of them. I’m much more familiar with stories of Catholic priests molesting little boys. Choosing to portray a Catholic priest as a victim feels like an odd flip of expected perpetrator and expected victim… I wonder what Russell was trying to say with that?
I’m not sure if Mary Doria Russell meant to portray Catholics (Jesuits specifically) in a favorable light or not. Generally, I think so, but at first she describes most of the Jesuits as really ugly. I thought she was going to be critical of the chain-of-command nature of Jesuit hierarchy, but I think she accepted it. It seemed to be portrayed as correct by the end. She pays a lot of lip service to Jesuit ingenuity, practicality, and discipline. I’ve heard Jesuits are more scholastic than other branches of Christianity (at least from what I read in A History of Western Philosophy), so that checks out.
I thought it was really ironic that Sofia was wary of Emilio in the same way that I was initially reluctant to read this book. Anne is talking to Emilio about Sofia’s ethnicity and why she’s so cold to him:
“At the end of all this, Anne said, “Well, it’s just a guess, but what occurs to me is that she’s Sephardic.” He came abruptly to a halt and stood still, eyes closed. “Of course. A Jew, of Spanish ancestry.” He looked at Anne. “She thinks my ancestors threw her ancestors out of Spain in 1492.”
I always feel a little nervous around Catholics (or any very religious people)… Jews really haven’t forgotten the Inquisition. Even today, Jews are sometimes put down by Christians, for instance, being told we’re going to hell, or that we killed Christ. Most of my interactions with Christians have been good, but sometimes there’s a little warning light that goes off in my mind that tells me to leave a social cushion between myself and this person because otherwise they might turn me in to the authorities if the Christian majority were to turn against us again. I also don’t know how much of Christian doctrine is still anti-Semitic, so I keep a little space between myself and very devout Christians. Maybe that’s prejudiced, but I think it’s warranted based on the history. I tend to gravitate towards people who are less religious anyway, since that’s how I am myself.
Anyway, I would not recommend this book. It’s interesting, but there’s so much political garbage that lies just barely concealed beneath the surface of imaginative scifi. It’s very colonialist, neoliberal, capitalist, orientalist… all those ideologies that are very much not in vogue anymore. I almost wish it were a little more explicit because it felt too vague to tell what messages she was trying to convey at times. I could imagine someone picking this up as a teen with no background and the traumatic nature of the story making a big impact on them without them noticing all the little political nudges in weird directions.
I’m still a little confused about what it all meant… she’s a converted Jew, but she’s writing mostly positively about Jesuit Catholicism. I’m still a bit stuck on the “why” of that. I guess “Write what you know”, and she does include some things about Judaism (one is a little off, though… she references “Woman of Valor” a poem some Jewish men sing to their wives on Shabbat, which is about being productive in the household, not about martial valor though she references it when the character is physically fighting).
If you’ve read it, let me know what you thought! Maybe you had a completely different take?
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