firecat

The Sparrow by Mary Doria Russell

The Sparrow does a really good job of drawing characters and describing their interactions, with people of different backgrounds and classes interacting. It includes interesting explorations of religion and faith. Several of the main characters are Jesuit priests, others are agnostics, and it is refreshing to read a book where religious and non- or differently-religious people work together and get along, instead of being depicted as fundamentally opposed.

However, I think Christians would get more out of this book than I do —as a buddhist/agnostic, I didn't find myself getting emotionally involved when the characters discussed whether God exists and how/whether God intervenes in the universe directly and if God is good and omnipotent then why does God allow evil to happen.

The Sparrow won the Tiptree award for books that explore gender. On the one hand, I am not especially impressed by the gender exploration per se. (In one of the alien species they encounter, the females are larger and in charge of things, and the males are smaller and take care of the young. So, the roles are just reversed. So what?) But the main male protagonist is a rape victim, and this also touches on gender, since in my culture it is assumed that rape is something that happens to females, thus male rape victims are considered "feminized." I appreciate that this book approaches the topic of male rape victims and does so seriously.

I also like the explorations of celibacy and love expressed in non-sexual and sometimes non-spoken terms.

This is one of a type of novel that gets a lot of its energy by hinting "There is a horrific secret to be revealed!" In this case you know some of the facts early on but you don't know why things happened the way they did. I tend to feel disappointed by such books because I'm not shocked by the revelations the way the characters are.
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OK, that was the well-behaved review. In my private journal entry, the way I commented on the "horrific secret" was this...which contains major spoilers for this book and The Devil of Nanking by Mo Hayder, so it's in rot-13:
V erpragyl ernq "Gur Qrivy bs Anaxvat," juvpu vf nyfb n obbx nobhg n ubeevsvp frperg. Ng gur raq bs guvf obbx V sbhaq zlfrys fnlvat "Qb lbh UNIR gb unir onol-rngvat, puvyq-xvyyvat, encr/gbegher, naq cebfgvghgvba va n obbx gurfr qnlf?"

There were lots of opportunities for "suspension of disbelief issues" in this book. Mostly they didn't particularly bother me, with one exception: I can't believe that humans a few decades from now would send highly qualified social anthropologists into space to whom it would not occur that (more rot-13) vagebqhpvat ntevphygher gb n uhagre-tngurere fbpvrgl would cause major changes and problems in that society.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

From:

vito-excalibur.livejournal.com

Yeah, I've had that kind of disgruntled reaction to recent Guy Gavriel Kay books, and George R.R. Martin. I mean, I like the stories, but do we have to dwell so lovingly on each individual disembowelment? I mean, my only free time to read these days is while I'm eating. It doesn't blend well. Ahh, maybe I'm just getting old. My mom didn't used to understand why I loved horror movies, either.

My personal review of the horrific secret, as I think I've posted earlier, is that "The horrific secret is that some people believe in God, and even still, really bad things happen? I'm pretty sure I was already spoiled for that one." Maybe this is because of not being Christian - but I don't think so. I liked most of the book, but the end sucked out loud.

From:

stefanie-bean.livejournal.com

I thought "The Sparrow" was interesting ... but I agree with you about the "reveals." OTOH, I studied anthropology in college (mostly physical anthropology, but I did take cultural courses), and it is NO surprise to me that cultural anthropologists could get it so wrong. I don't know if the writer intended this, but one thing that was coming out in the era when The Sparrow was published was the "Everything You Know About the South Seas is Wrong." Margaret Mead and others made a big deal of all the "sexual freedom" in Samoa and the Trobriands - all wrong, and more about Margaret Mead than the indigenous people. Even the old anthropological thought that "South Sea Islanders didn't know about pregnancy" turned out to be wrong; the local folk largely were having fun at the anthropologists' expense, telling them dirty jokes, etc.

So it would not surprise me if the writer wove some of that into her story, although I have no way of knowing if she deliberately intended it or not. From my standpoint, the anthropologists catching a case of EPIC FAIL was not a surprise.

There were some good explorations of masculinity as power. Because the aliens were more powerful than human beings, and the human beings had no military backup, and no way to even bluff one (like Commodore Perry did when he contacted Japan in the 1850s - the Japanese let Perry & Co. live because they thought there were huge hosts of fleets like his where that came from, when in actuality Perry had most of the US Marines with him - and if the Japanese had just slaughtered them all in Tokyo Bay, that would have been "all he wrote" for a long time re: Japan.)

LOL to rot-13 for spoilers, too.

From:

stefanie-bean.livejournal.com

Sorry, I meant to write, "they didn't know about the male role in pregnancy."

From:

firecat

and it is NO surprise to me that cultural anthropologists could get it so wrong

I think the author was deliberately writing some of that stuff into her story, based on one particular passage.

I had no problem with everything else she had the visitors get wrong. Just that one thing.

But for all I know, perhaps my sense that the one thing is utterly obvious is derived from the Star Trek Prime Directive, or maybe Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs, and Steel, and not from the one social anthropology course I took in college.