Let down
While I enjoyed reading "The Sparrow," Mary Doria Russell's novel of soul-shaking ideas, I felt ultimately let down by her inability to pull the whole thing together. The plot follows a Jesuit mission to the planet Rakhat, newly discovered when the Arecibo observatory in Puerto Rico receives a radio signal containing beautiful extraterrestrial choral music. In an alternate story arch, we follow Father Emilio Sandoz after his return from Rakhat as the only survivor from the mission. Horribly mutilated and mentally scarred, he is put to an inquest by his Jesuit superiors regarding depraved actions he is alleged to have committed.
While the characterization is tight and the suspense builds nicely in both plot lines (When will he break and tell his superiors what made him question God? When will the catastrophe on Rakhat hit?), it was incredibly frustrating to see an author give herself everything she needed to make a very powerful statement, and then not use any of it. Emilio returns to Earth broken, deeply questioning everything he ever felt about his faith. But the specific event that causes this soul-shattering breakdown is almost banal compared to everything else going on in the story (and it is also something that happens with regularity here on our own planet). I simply do not understand how Russell managed to miss the mark so widely when it was her own material that she ignored in order to come to a lightweight conclusion. All she had to do was gather up her own narrative threads and she would have had something really powerful. It truly is a shame.
That said, those narrative threads got ME thinking, even if Russell didn't do anything with them herself, so I would still say it's worth a read. In fact, I want my friends to read it merely so we can debate it amongst ourselves.
