[SPOILERS AFTER THE BREAK]
Emilio Sandoz, a Jesuit linguist, is an intensly likable and lovingly drawn central character, the more sympathetic for the reader’s third-person perspective. The same cannot be said for the secondary characters, all of whom possess essentially identical personalities with only the most superficial of traits differentiating them beyond personal pronouns. Although marketed as science fiction, the novel is best thought of as an anachronistic account of some 15th century voyage of discovery: the aliens are more or less human, the planet, Rakhat, is more or less Earth, and the cramped voyage and enormous time delay communicating home would be familiar to seafaring merchants and missionaries of old.
The Sparrow consists of two interlinked build-ups to two inevitable falls. As the book begins, Emilio is a man whose body and mind have been devastated by intense suffering. Through a cycle of flashbacks to the voyage and descriptions of Emilio’s wretched present state, the magnitude of his ordeal is hyperbolised until, in the closing chapters, its nature is finally revealed. The second rise and subsequent fall is Russell’s promise to deliver on a abhorrence deserving of an entire novel’s worth of prologue. Such an abomination does not exist, of course, and that is entirely the point. When we at last learn that Emilio endured months of sodomy, the consumption of the flesh of innocents, and a handful of other horrors, we realize that the Jesuit sages who have been guiding his recovery were right all along. Terrible things have happened to good people throughout human history. There are no absolutes, least of all good and evil, and even those who have suffered terribly can still find happiness if they have the strength to reach for it.
The sequel begins where The Sparrow left off and takes the story in some unexpected but mostly pleasing directions. The introverted and atheistic overtones of the first book are supplanted by grander themes on a less personal scale, with an awkward shot at a cosmic message which would have been better left at the editor’s desk. Emilio remains the iron core of the story, while a family of carbon-copy villains are added to the mix. His friends, both the old and the new, are again virtually indistinguishable except by name.
The poignant opening of Children of God sees Emilio leave the priesthood, find love and begin to rebuild his life, until he is kidnapped and forced to return to Rakhat for vaguely defined religious and mercantile purposes. The gimmicks and twists of fate needed to bolster this and many other unlikely turns in the plot rather overdraw on the reader’s suspension of disbelief, which Russell had already depleted heavily in establishing a friendly and familiar alien world. On Rakhat, great social and political changes have occurred, and Russell spends most of the novel documenting these with sure and often witty prose, although little of the emotional or thematic weight of The Sparrow remains. The settling of the planet-wide upheaval and Emilio’s return to Earth would have rounded the story off neatly, but Russell tacks on an incongruous coda in which a link, described in only the vaguest way but somehow linked to human music, is found between the human genome and those of Rakhat’s two sentient species. Without this additon, Children of God would have been a satisfying tying-off of the ends left loose in The Sparrow, and an admittedly welcome chance to see the immensely sympathetic Emilio in action once more. With it, it is a warm yet odd apologia for what the author may see as The Sparrow’s spiritual equivocation.
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