Re-read review: ‘The Sparrow’ & ‘Children of God’, by Mary Doria Russell
This duology, published in the mid 1990s, blends religion and science fiction better than anything else I’ve read, and tackles some heavy subjects that are still under-discussed, all while introducing a fascinating alien world. At the start of the first book, the Catholic Church and, specifically, the Society of Jesus (AKA the Jesuit order) are dealing with a scandal. When music was detected coming from Alpha Centauri some four decades earlier, they quietly sent an expedition to find out more about these other children of God. Only one member returned. A UN mission, which subsequently also disappeared, reported that they found Father Emilio Sandoz working as a prostitute, and that the first thing they saw him do was kill a child. Father General Giuliani wants to find out what the hell happened, but Sandoz is a wreck: Besides suffering from nightmares that leave him screaming and vomiting, his hands have been mysteriously mutilated. The chapters jump back and forth in time as the truth unfolds. The second book reveals that there was actually one more survivor from the first mission, as well as the changes that have occurred on Rakhat since. I read these books several times twenty years ago, but I wanted to see how they held up to a 2021 re-read.
The first thing I was reminded of is how much I adore all the members of the Stella Maris crew - which of course makes what happens to them all the more painful! Emilio Sandoz is a Puerto Rican Jesuit linguist. He has a quick mind, a wry sense of humor, and really cares about people. At the same time, he has a stoic and solitary, even lonely, quality about him even before the traumatizing events on Rakhat. Sophia Mendez is a Sephardic Jew and indentured AI engineer, who is initially chilly to Emilio because he looks like central casting’s idea of an inquisitor. In fact, they have a lot in common, including intellectual passion, a talent for banter, and traumatic childhoods. Everyone agrees they’d make a terrific couple…if Emilio weren’t actually quite serious about his vows! Sophia’s unbreakable determination – both to live and, where possible, to seek justice - ends up rubbing off on him and many others. The two had worked together before on developing a language-learning program, but are brought back together by Emilio’s friend Jimmy Quinn, an astronomer at the Arecibo radio telescope. His bosses want to replace human signal searchers with an AI, so Jimmy proposes a challenge: Hire the best programmer, and then test if the product can beat him. It is during that process that a Jimmy notices a signal that he (or the program) would normally have filtered out because it looks like music. He calls in Sophia, Emilio, and an older couple who have semi-adopted them all (engineer George and Doctor Anne Edwards) to listen to the definitely-not-earth-music. All five are chosen for the subsequent mission because their respective talents and close bonds make it seem meant to be. They are joined by three other Jesuit priests: DW Yarborough, a rangy Texan with military flight training; extremely French biologist Marc Robichaux; and short-lived musicologist Alan Pace.
An important aspect of the story is that the mission isn’t a mission in the way one might expect. The Jesuits have a really interesting and complicated history. While initially focused on missionary work and counter-reformation, Jesuits have acted as confessors to kings, both converters of and advocates for native peoples, and proponents of liberation theology. But one constant has been a reputation for intellectual rigor…although in some cases this reputation has become “clever to the point of deviousness”. The latter interpretation could well be applied to the Father General and his plans to get Sandoz to talk. But the crew of the Stella Maris are there primarily to learn and maybe later exchange notes on religion with the local inhabitants! They are quite conscious of wanting to avoid the mistakes or outright predatory behavior of first-contacts of the past. However, one central point of the story is that, when dealing with an utterly foreign place and culture, mistakes are inevitable.
The warm, wet climate and three suns of Rakhat foster a lush and vibrant ecology. The first inhabitants our travelers meet, the Runa, fit this Edenic image, being peaceable, highly social vegetarians with a talent for weaving and crafting perfumes. They are bipedal but furry, with mobile ears, a tail, and large double-pupiled eyes. A cool aspect of their society is that females are larger, so most gender roles are flipped relative to humans, with the women handing off childcare to the men soon after birth and taking the lead in trade and group defense. Emilio Sandoz, previously a secret agnostic, is visibly brimming over with wonder and excitement about where God has led them. But soon it becomes evident that something is off. As nice as the Runa might be, they aren’t very technologically advanced – no metal let alone radios in sight - and they are frightened of music, the very thing that drew the humans’ attention. However, the crew fails to realize what this and other clues mean in time to avert tragedy.
One thing I hadn’t realized on my first reads – because the characters then were much older than me – is that the two central characters are actually from my generation: The songs from Alpha Centauri are detected in 2019 when Emilio and Sophia are in their 30’s, making them millennials. And oh, the Arecibo telescope! Maybe if it actually had been bought by the Japanese, or had picked up an alien signal in 2019, it would have gotten some proper maintenance and not collapsed in 2020. Yes, there’s a little of that ‘90s assumption that the Japanese and their robots were going to own the world soon; Ironic, really, considering Japan had already entered a decade-long recession in 1991. It’s also funny to read descriptions of imagined 2015 college fashions: The young men in brilliantly colored, intricately pleated coats…the young women wasp-waisted and delicious in pale and shimmering fabrics the colors of peony blossoms and sherbet. Nope! Sorry, we were all still slumming it in jeans and tee-shirts, just like in 1996 and 2021. Sadly, the most jarring thing was spending so much time with a priest who is genuinely good with children. What with abuse scandal after abuse scandal coming out over the past three decades, my Catholic friends would never leave their kids alone with a priest, and some avoid giving money directly to the church lest it be used for a cover-up. Totally sensible, in the circumstances, but that reputation has to be hard on those who, like Emilio, truly deserve the title of “father”.
Both books contain a lot of musing on love of different sorts, the meaning of suffering and forgiveness, and whether – in the face of horrifying tragedy – it is more comforting to believe in a god or not. Emilio Sandoz really gets put through the wringer, not just by what happened to him on Rakhat and having to relive it in front of his superiors, but by literally getting dragged kicking and screaming back to Rakhat in the second! At one point, a character notes that Sandoz might be one of the “beloved of God”, at which point another wryly notes that, as Saint Theresa once said: “If this is how God treats his friends, it’s no wonder he has so few of them.” It is left up to the reader to judge whether individuals of all three species acted rightly overall or not, if the events of the book are supportive of the concept of a loving God, and, to a certain extent, whether the overall impact of humans on Rakhat has been positive. I’d say the author thinks the answer to that last question is “yes” but considering that there was war and genocide involved, not to mention some massive ecological changes, it’s not a simple “yes”.
If you want to avoid any real *spoilers*, stop here and go read the books! But content warnings for discussion of sexual violence, violence in general, and sort-of cannibalism in both the books and the rest of the review.
The main crucial fact the humans failed to realize about Rakhat is that it houses not one intelligent species, but two. The Jana’ata were the dominant culture and the ones producing the songs. They look superficially much like the Runa, but are carnivores, with long claws on their hands and prehensile feet that can hook their prey’s ankle. The Runa, in the fashion of ‘A Modest Proposal’, serve as both working class and meat! The trouble starts when the humans, stranded on this world, plant a garden to help feed themselves. The Runa imitate this, and the extra food allows them to reproduce outside of Jana’ata control. When the cullers come, Sophia, raised on tales of pogroms throughout history, snatches a child back, proclaiming to the Runa: “We are many, they are few.” This being the very thing rulers always hope will remain forgotten, the rebellious Runa and most of the humans are killed, while Sandoz finds himself maimed and sold into sexual slavery by the one Jana’ata he thought he could trust.
We get more VaRakhati perspectives in book 2, and in the process learn a bit more of the backstory and motivations of the characters Emilio would consider the villains of his story. The main bad guy of book 1 is still a terrible person, and I’m glad his version of revolution is not the one that won, but Suupari VaGajur is an interesting case. He had always been willing to treat the Runa more like people than most Jana’ata and formed what he thought were close friendships with the human visitors – especially Ann, who he named his daughter Ha’anala after. Even so, his self-interested desires blinded him to both the fact that he had massively misunderstood what the English words “celibacy” and “to serve” mean, and the fact that his whole civilization was built on enslaving and eating a species who are definitely also people. When he realizes this, he dedicates the rest of his life to changing the system that had hurt Emilio, Ann, the Runa, and himself.
One of the most heart-wrenching parts of ‘The Sparrow’, for the main character and the reader, is the way that Emilio's colleagues are prepared to offer forgiveness but are not prepared for him to be innocent – of murder and prostitution, at least. He does blame himself for not realizing the truth sooner, and for eating the meat his captors offered when he was starving. As Emilio himself notes, on some level his interrogators were probably all hoping that there was something he did, some choice he made, or something about him, that would mean it couldn’t have happened to them. There isn’t. Especially when it comes to the special personal traumas suffered by Emilio Sandoz…well, he’s the last person to have been able to see them coming, let alone avoid them. A woman probably also wouldn’t have realized that an offer of hasta’akala meant “let me cut all the muscles out of your palms to indicate that you are my dependent”. But she might possibly have been suspicious that an attempt to explain this term involved pointing to a type of ivy wrapped around a post - picking up on the implications of decorative weakness - and asked a few more questions. And probably anyone who isn’t a cis het man who's been trying not to think about sex for the past two decades would be freaking out immediately on finding themselves in a perfumed room with a menagerie of beautiful oddities, wearing only a jeweled collar. “I guess I’m an exotic pet monkey now” would be the best-case scenario you’d try to console yourself with, not the first assumption!
Sexual assault is always horrible, but I suspect there is an added element of shock for those who haven’t been aware since childhood that there is a double-digit probability of becoming a target of it - which digits depending on which demographic boxes you check1 but all being far too high. I’m not saying being caught off guard is overall worse than living with chronic dread and then having the dreaded thing happen, mind you, just that the experience would be bad in a different way. Moreover, our society still isn’t good at talking about this issue, let alone actually protecting people, and victim-blaming is rife. But while a woman might be asked “what were you wearing?” a man is likely to meet with confusion or disbelief that such a thing could have happened to him at all. Even those who express sympathy for female victims all too often dismiss or play off as a joke similar violations exercised against men (Looking at you, writers of ‘Wonder Woman 1984’). Conversely, of course, women get treated as if they are inherently a temptation. Emilio gets really angry when he realizes the papers he co-authored with Sophia haven’t been published yet, and then confused when the Father General says it would be bad optics. He never knew that, prior to signing her indenture contract with the tech company, Sophia had survived as a war orphan by becoming a very young teenage prostitute. Emilio shifts back to angry when he realizes that that’s the supposed bad optics: that the public might consider them both tainted by something they had no choice in. Father Giuliani wisely does not mention his first thought that what brought down the mission was the decision to include women – that somehow Sophia or the secular Ann had led Emilio and/or the others into debauchery – otherwise he probably would have gotten some metal-braced knuckles to the face!
Emilio knows that it wasn’t his fault, that he didn’t ask for this,
didn’t want it…yet it is still extremely hard for him to say: “I was raped”.
Again, that would be hard for anyone, but for someone as proud as Emilio Sandoz,
someone raised in a culture of machismo, it is doubly so. He would feel shame
at not being able to defend himself, even though he’s small for a human and
even smaller relative to a Jana’ata. It is that shame, coupled with despair and
pain, that leads to the final tragedy. He knows that he can take down
someone larger than him if he has the chance for a pre-emptive tackle. So, he
resolves that the next time his door opens he’s going to kill whoever’s on the
other side. Unfortunately, that person is not one of his tormentors but instead
the child Askama, someone who cared about him and brought the UN team members
she believed to be his family to take him home.
1. See some stats here for men vs. women and for LGBT+ folks. Even the lowest rates are pretty horrifying, and the high ones...Let's just say that anyone who thinks trans women are the ones we should worry ABOUT, instead of worry FOR, has never read any actual studies on the subject!
Emilio Sandoz’s road to healing is a long and zigzagging one. When we pick up with him in the second book, he’s recovered a moderate amount of physical strength and some of his sense of humor. But he still has nightmares and is still deeply angry at God. He leaves the priesthood - though he continues training Jesuits in Rakhati languages - and finds love with a woman named Gina, starting to build a family with her and her young daughter Celestina. Though he seems happy for the first time in years, his former church bosses really want him to go back to Rakhat. He refuses, even after he learns that Sophia was still alive at the time he was sent home. So, a few weeks before his wedding, with the knowledge of the leading Jesuit on the mission, the Father General’s mafioso cousin has him shanghaied.
Emilio is so terrified that he has to be beaten up, threatened with the murder of a friend, and drugged for the first few months of the mission. As they near Rakhat, his sullen resistance turns into fevered activity, as he drills the others on the languages and culture, exercises obsessively, and makes sure he can fly the lander with his own ruined hands if he has to. But then the planet comes in sight and they find it entirely changed, covered in elaborately patterned gardens, and they pick up a transmission from a now 72-year-old Sophia. After the massacre (in which she lost an eye but wasn't killed) Sophia, Suupari, and a young Runa woman became the leaders of a successful rebellion. The ones in danger now are the remaining two-thousand-or-so carnivores! While waiting to meet with Sophia, the new visitors are approached by four individuals and Emilio is immediately triggered to realize that two are Jana’ata in disguise, one with the same eyes as his “owner”. But while Rukuei is indeed that man’s son, he is also an ambassador of a group of Jana’ata and Runa seeking a new way to live in harmony – a group that includes Sophia’s son Issac and Ha’anala, Suupari's daughter that Sophia semi-adopted. The phrase that convinces Emilio that they are telling the truth is the description of Runa meat as “not kosher”! Sophia, though, hasn’t heard from either child in years, thinks this is a trap, and brings in the army to follow them. It is up to Emilio Sandoz to broker peace, so as not to see any more children die. He returns to earth with Rukuei, preceded by transmissions of a new music Isacc “discovered” by combining the DNA sequences of the three species. Gina has died, but at her grave he finds a young woman with his nose and Gina’s hair, who asks if he wants to hold his grandson.
The issue of sexual violence (and trauma in general) and its aftermath is, I think, handled quite well. Indeed, the book deals with it better than many written more recently. However, the second book includes some issues where the author’s approach, while clearly intended to be compassionate, may feel outdated or…iffy. For instance, Isaac is clearly autistic and (good job here) is shown to thrive and communicate better given the right environment. However, he is described as being emotionless; People at the more severe end of the autism spectrum still have emotions, they just have trouble expressing them or interpreting the emotional expressions of others! There’s also a half-Sioux character whose portrayal I’d definitely want to check with someone who has that background, if I were an editor. He and the first African pope (someone who Emilio helped when he was still a refugee child) are the ones who approve kidnapping Sandoz, even though saving souls and “the ends justify the means” was the kind of thinking that got the church involved in the colonial activities that hurt their people. Father Ironhorse also sympathizes with the Jana’ata before he even knows they are an endangered species because he sees them as a misunderstood hunter/warrior culture. And sure, that’s true, but they also form a highly stratified and exploitative ruling class more resembling Byzantine royalty than anything in traditional Sioux culture. Similarly, while a sympathetic gay character is included in the form of the folksy Yarborough, he is celibate. The two characters who act on their same-gender desires are both selfish, violent, bisexual libertines. So, um, kind of an uncomfortable dichotomy there, even if it was unintentional!
Another thing that feels very 1990s is how much reproduction and population growth comes up, with population growth sometimes being treated as if it is the primary cause of poverty. Besides being a major factor in the conflicts on Rakhat, there is supposedly a big conflict between the Jesuits and the Vatican over birth control. The thing is, here in the real 2020s, global birth rates have been (voluntarily) declining steeply for decades, and this seems to be driven more by advancements in women’s rights and access to health care than by what religion a country follows. While religious hardliners can be an issue with that, it isn't really the Catholics that are driving most of the current resistance. Also, considering that we globally produce enough food to feed 10 billion humans and yet too high a proportion of the 7.6 billion that actually exist go hungry, the problem is more lack of equity. The latter point is particularly important when considering the potential effects of releasing reproductive controls on the VaRakhati. The Runa are more intrinsically sociable and cooperative than humans: they don’t even enjoy competitive games. If poverty is a result of inequality, it seems unlikely that Runa population growth would produce beggars in a generation or two unless they also rapidly changed their “all for one” culture. Certainly their nutrition-related limits on fertility that kick in far above starvation level would avoid the “too many mouths to feed” problem so many poor human families face!
Switching to a related issue, while its certainly fine that Emilio gets to have biological descendants, that wasn’t really something he needed. He can demonstrably love any child as if it is his own. What I would have liked to have seen is him finally getting to have and keep romantic love. In any other story that would be a cliché, but not this one. Emilio says he felt that celibacy was necessary for him as a priest because he’d never been able to grasp the idea that the body and soul were separate, and that’s also why he couldn’t compartmentalize the violation of his body but instead felt like his self was being broken as well. Full healing is going to have to include coming to a new relationship with his sexuality and ability to love an individual person in that way; Gina helped him start that process, but it got rather unceremoniously interrupted!
Overall recommendation:
Content warnings and quibbles about what one could classify as “90’s liberal Catholic hot-takes”
in book 2 aside, I would definitely still recommend these. The combination of solid
sci-fi - including implications of alien biological differences or the
disparate-aging effects of travel at relativistic speeds - with explorations of
ethics, cultural misunderstandings, and how we find meaning and cope with trauma is really unique. Moreover, the books were recommended to me by an ex-Jesuit I know, suggesting Russell gave a decently balanced view of that organization.
‘The Sparrow’ is overall the stronger of the two, though it is a bit of a rough read. That emotional power is what makes it better, but it is nice to get the palate-cleanser of a mostly hopeful if still bittersweet ending in ‘Children of God’. Of course, some readers might see that ending as justifying all the terrible things that happened to Emilio Sandoz and his companions and be upset by that implication. I don’t love that that is a possible reading, but I would argue that it isn’t the only way you can interpret the story.
