Just got back from the Sci Fi Book Group at my local Borders. I decided to head along this month because the book intrigued me – The Sparrow by Mary Doria Russell. I told my housemate about it and she came up with the wonderfully precise but inaccurate description “Jesuits in spaaaaaace”. This would be a really bad summing up of the book. A group of people, lead, including and funded by the Jesuits is sent to investigate and communicate with a newly discovered alien culture. Only one member returns with the best reports suggesting a major disgrace on his part. The action alternates between the debreifing of Emilio and the action leading up to the mission and the mission itself.
The first thing to say is that although we all seemed to enjoy it, we all had different criticisms of it. I read the whole thing in pretty much just one weekend. I fell in love with the characters and the story gave me new perspectives on things. And it's another story with a linguist main character I love (the other being China Mieville's The Scar). In dealing with the criticisms I will be introducing spoilers, so if you care about that, stop reading about now and come back after you've read the book. But do go and read the book.
A major bone of contention was the sheer naivety of the crew and the actual space faring science. The group had a problem believing that the hollowed out asteroid could be used as a spaceship and controlled with effectively just one person. They were equally unimpressed with the way that the crew naively assumed that the atmosphere would be breathable and the food edible. My personal views on this are twofold – Russell did throw just enough plausibility over these things to reduce the suspension of disbelief to more manageable levels. She explains their food tasting procedures. She explains how they all took turns to teach and learn each other specialties so that they would have to rely less on any one person for life threatening situations.
She also has the characters referring to the unlikeliness of the situation and them concluding, often, that “Deus vult”, “God wants it that way”. This is not, however, an incantation of “deus ex machina”. All the way through Anne is skeptical of this explanation and pointing out the counter to it – that God wants the bad stuff too. And it is this realisation that breaks Emilio. He has fallen so far into the idea that God wants things a certain way that when he gets raped he has to either accept it as God's will or accept there is no God. That twist of “Deus vult” is an important feature of the plot and so using it as an excuse earlier on becomes not a way of whitewashing over the science, but an important theme of the book.
The other main theme of criticism was the characters. While I, and others, liked Anne and George and would love to be on their invite list, others found them annoying. There was also criticism that some of the characters were poorly sketched. Alan, for example, is included in the crew with virtually no introduction and then killed off just as quickly.
A final item we discussed was just how much influence the crew could really have over the prey culture. At the end, Sophia urges the prey into trying to fight, advising them “there's more of you then of them”. They race was described as incapable of thinking up new ideas, but only altering and refining current ideas. I believe this is a problem from their language. Their language is described as naming only function – not form. A vase would be “a vessel for holding plants” and as such it is impossible to think of it being able to be used for anything else. Language plays an important part in helping us to explore new ideas. This clinging to old labels is comfortable because it doesn't require us to think new things. It's why queer is such a threatening word to so many. Why breaking away from the gender norm is so difficult to comprehend for people. It means changing how we use language.
My apologies go out to those who I may have misrepresented above.
I also wanted to discuss China Mieville's comments on this book. I'm having to go by other reviewer's summations of his comments as I was at neither WorldCon 2005 nor Orbital 2008 where the comments were made. Going by Elmyra's summary of the latter, I understand Mieville painted this book as being homophobic due to the “thread going through the book which really is characterised by a deep fear of homosexual acts”. I don't think you can get any further from the reality of the book here. Emilio was RAPED. RAPED by a male of the species to whom he resembles an “immature female”. The rape in the book could was not just male to male. It was alien to human. It was adult to "immature". It was even male to perceived female. I don't recall anywhere where Emilio is upset by the fact that it was homosexual sex rather than just rape. Calling this book homophobic is to massively misunderstand the import of the rape.
I also wanted to comment on the gender aspect. There is a part of the book where we establish that the party has been sexist and assumed that the gender roles seen on Rekhat exactly mirrored our own. The party then felt that this explained a great deal of misunderstanding. The only true gender reversal was that the men had (vastly shortened) pregnancies and the women had penises. The women still stayed at home and brought up the children. The men still went out and interacted, traded etc. This was hardly a renegotiation of gender roles. The crew of the mission though felt that it was more important to swap over the vast majority of the gender role identities and keep the penis and child-bearing capabilities as the sole characteristic that defined the man and woman gender roles and as such attributed great importance to it.
My final comment is about two passages from the book. I mentioned earlier that the book alternated between the mission and the debrief. Actually there are two passages which stand out because they don't fit into that pattern. These passages are the ones where we see Supaari at his normal life before he meets the crew. Everything else is written from a human perspective and this really stands out. It shouldn't be there. It jars horribly. I could understand it if they presented this as part of the missing reports the crew sent back (as chapter headings – like Inara's books on Paul Maud-ib in Dune). I could understand if Supaari explained it in a speech/discussion. But to have it stand so alone was just bad.
There were other notes I made about the different understandings of God shown by the characters and the predator/prey relationship (which it sounds like is covered a little more in the sequel – Children of God – which has been duly added to my “to buy and read” list (it's a long list).
I'll end on Anne's philosophy I'd love to embrace more fully in my life:
“What the hell, it's got to be better than not quite dying in a bus wreck on vacation.”
Alex
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