“Are not two sparrows sold for a penny? Yet not one of them will fall to the ground outside your Father’s care.” (Matthew 10: 29.)
As we patiently wait for this year’s Clarke season to get underway (we have been reliably informed this will happen soon) I have been travelling back in time to revisit some older works of science fiction, some of them past winners of the Clarke, some of them now ascended to the status of classics. I like to do this periodically because I enjoy it, because I have never failed to find it instructive and fascinating. The field of science fiction is now so big and so diverse it would be impossible to encompass all of it in a single lifetime; nonetheless, there are certain works that keep cropping up, works you hear about so often there is often the sensation of having absorbed them by osmosis. Which cannot compare with having actually read them, a fact illuminated for me this week as I finally caught up with Mary Doria Russell’s landmark novel of first contact, The Sparrow.
The Sparrow won the Clarke Award in 1998, the same year Mary Doria Russell was awarded the Astounding Award for Best New Writer and the BSFA Award for Best Novel. She had already won the Tiptree Award in 1996, The Sparrow’s year of (US) publication. A big winner then, a big hitter. Looking at the 1998 Clarke Award shortlist now and in the light of having just read The Sparrow, Russell’s win seems obvious, a no-brainer. Reviews at the time universally praised the novel for its humanity, its depth of vision, its refusal to provide the reader with easy answers. I would describe The Sparrow as absolutely classic second-wave, social SF, as close to the Le Guinian ideal as you could get without actually being Le Guin. Reading it was enough to make me fall hopelessly back in love with this kind of close focus, unironic, problem-based science fiction, to remind me not just of the point of it but the sense of urgency it can carry, especially in our current times.
The Sparrow is a deep, dense, difficult novel that stands equally as a classic of political fiction, philosophical fiction or social commentary. Yet the question that nagged at me most persistently during my reading was as to whether The Sparrow would get published today, in its current form, by a science fiction imprint?
The Sparrow is the story of Emilio Sandoz, a young Jesuit priest from a poor background in Puerto Rico who has experienced trouble and violence throughout his childhood. His talent for languages has taken him into many other disadvantaged communities all over the world, and when the SETI program at Arecibo begins to pick up verifiably alien radio communications, Emilio is stricken with the passionate desire to travel to their source, to meet the aliens for himself and come to a greater understanding of God’s purpose.
The mission to Rakhat, organised under the aegis of the Jesuit Society, seems at first to be astoundingly successful: Emilio and his comrades make a safe planetfall, soon coming into contact with peaceable rural hunter-gatherers called the Runa. Through a series of increasingly complex interactions and misfortunes , the travellers become aware that they have barely scratched the surface of the planet’s culture and reality. When Emilio eventually returns to Earth, he is not at all the same man who left. The novel offers a tense and thrilling chronology of what really happened; it equally examines the question of whether Emilio will ever be able to come to terms with that.
Commentary on The Sparrow tends to focus on the question of faith: what is it, and can it be maintained in the face of one’s own error, wrongdoing or personal suffering? Mary Doria Russell was brought up a Catholic, though she later declared herself an agnostic before converting to Judaism. Matters of faith and the nature of the religious experience have preoccupied her throughout her writing life and the delicate, empathetic, wholly non-judgmental way these issues are handled in The Sparrow makes for a profound and thought-provoking reading experience. The novel is equally a powerful meditation on the erroneous and damaging assumptions of ‘enlightened’ colonialism, the harm that can be done to others simply through ignorance; the humans contaminate the ecology of Rakhat simply by being there, and their uninvited presence in the lives of the Runa community has ramifications they cannot even guess at. That Russell introduces these questions without seeking to apportion blame makes The Sparrow doubly powerful and three times as interesting.
For The Sparrow is, above all, a novel of character. The first third of the novel is spent exploring the lives and complex histories of the principal characters, their relationship to one another and how they came to be involved in one another’s fates. There is an intricacy here, a willingness to sit down with people and learn about them, that is absolutely central to the success and impact of the novel as a whole. If I were to draw a comparison, it would be with the densely layered character work undertaken by Emily St John Mandel in Station Eleven: without the complexity and detail of the sections set before the Georgia flu pandemic, Station Eleven would be just one more post-apocalyptic ‘band of brothers’ novel. It is Mandel’s centring of character, of individual psychology that lifts it above and beyond, that makes the book extraordinary. So it is with The Sparrow, and I can only hope that if a new writer were to produce a comparable work today, they would meet with the kind of editor prepared to fight for the book on its own terms, rather than conceding to a commercial pressure that certainly exists, to ratchet up the tension, to keep the action moving, to get to the point.
In the very best fiction, the journey very often is the point, what it reveals about a set of characters in a particular environment. You could argue that science fiction especially is precisely about that. The Sparrow is a magnificent achievement. Russell’s novel is now a quarter of a century old, yet feels timeless in its storytelling. It absolutely did make me fall back in love with this idea of science fiction, and I would like us to see more of it.