The Sparrow by Mary Doria Russell

I read a lot, but I don’t usually do reviews. I’m trying to change that, because I’ve realized that writing out my actual thoughts on this stuff helps me understand the media I consume better. This will be as vague as possible to avoid spoilers.📚

The Sparrow by Mary Doria Russell initially seemed tailor-made for me: philosophical literature dipping a toe into science-fiction, space Jesuits, struggles with faith and humanity, alien civilizations, promises of haunting prose.

At first, I put the book squarely in the “okay” camp. Good start, rushed ending. Usually my estimation of a book stays the same after I finish it, so it surprised me to realize that I was still thinking about The Sparrow days after I read it, particularly the characters and the alien culture. This is one of the reasons why I don’t assign numerical or star ratings to books! Sometimes it’s just hard to tell how you actually feel about a book. I had to let this one roll around in my brain for a bit, but I’ve come to the conclusion that it’s obviously good or I wouldn’t have a) devoured it in two days or b) be devoting a blog post to it. There are some caveats attached, though.

First, the good things:

The main characters were a joy to read about. They were all so charismatic in different, believable ways. Everyone was brilliant and thoughtful and funny, and they all seemed like people I wanted to know. I was a little jealous of the dinner parties full of witty conversation they held in the books. And they all had fully fleshed-out backstories! Even with 500 pages of material, I don’t know how Russell managed that without taking away from the story’s pace. I feel like I know these people, like they’re fully-realized individuals. How did she do that?

Russell clearly has massive respect and love for linguistics. She takes such care in describing the steps the humans take to learn the aliens’ language, and the philosophy behind it, and how culture influences how we use words. It was infectious. Those were absolutely my favorite parts of the book. A little like “Story of Your Life,” by Ted Chiang.

The descriptions of the alien culture captivated me, too: their focus on scents, the art, their cities. Russell put a lot of detail in that, too. The alien culture seems believable, not too foreign/”science-fiction-y” just for the sake of it. You can tell Russell was an anthropologist before she was an author.

I am a sucker for multiple POVs and time periods in a story, and it works great here. Builds tension, doesn’t get confusing. You learn a little bit about the characters' fates at the beginning of the book, just enough to keep you wondering how it’s going to end up like it does.

Watching the characters struggle with their faith in such tough circumstances felt realistic. I’m a big old heathen so I don’t have too much input on this part, but Russell seemed to handle it with a lot of grace. The characters are deeply moral people put in terrible, nightmarish situations, and some of them begin to doubt their beliefs while some cling even more strongly to them - both believable reactions. The book does bring up a lot of philosophical questions, but doesn’t try to answer them, which I think is the right way to handle it. Again, I can’t talk too much about this part without going into spoilers, but everybody acted so very human. Russell nailed that part.

This doesn’t really have any bearing on how good the book is, but I do think it’s cool that it was written in 1996, and the majority of the book takes place in 2019-2060. The vision of what 2019 looks like to someone in 1996 is a lot more interesting to me than what 2019 would look like to someone in, say, 1954. It’s neat to see what she got wrong and what she got right. In particular, there’s a grimly prescient c-plot in the book describing AIs called “vultures” that are taking people’s jobs.

Now, the bad stuff:

Brilliant as they are, the characters make some impressively dumb decisions, specifically about first contact with an alien species. There’s one that I really, really want to talk about because it bugs me to no end, but it’s a huge spoiler. If you have read The Sparrow, please message me so I can rant about this before I’m forced to go to Reddit and rant at them. Anyway, the characters make some fairly remedial mistakes that people who are supposed to be brilliant would not make. This is the big one for me, the one that brings the book down a few notches in my eyes.

So many of the conflicts in the book could have been solved if the characters had just had a conversation about things! This has been a thorn in my side ever since I noticed the same issue in LOST. Holding back information just for the sake of the plot feels bad, when the characters definitely would have talked about it.

The prose was lovely and easy to devour. Like I said, the characterizations are wonderful, the descriptions of the characters’ surroundings are vivid without overloading you with too many details. The dialogue didn’t sit well with me, though. It didn’t flow naturally. I don’t know how to explain it. Like every character in every scene had to have a chance to say something, round-table style, which is just not how it happens in real life. And their conversations were too quippy for me, a lot of the time. Like she jumped on the Whedon-dialogue bus early.

The ending felt rushed, like maybe Russell ran out of steam. Maybe it’s just because I would have liked to have spent more time learning about the aliens and their culture.

Ultimately, it’s hard to know whether or not to recommend The Sparrow to people - it’s up to individual taste more than usual, I think, so I tried to give you a pretty good overview of how I saw the book without spoiling it. There’s some pretty gruesome parts, including a hand maiming and a brutal sexual assault that is central to the plot, so please be aware of that. It’s not a happy book at all. Not quite as grim as The Book of Strange New Things, but close. I felt compelled to write a bit about it, because despite the drawbacks, the story is definitely sticking with me.