Finished: March 28
Pages: 405
I’ve been sitting here for about fifteen minutes just waiting to have the words to talk about this book without sounding ridiculous. After going a month of reading purely academic essays, and then reading the campy hilarity that was The Somnambulist, it was a definite change to read The Sparrow, a story of what would happen if we found life on another planet and wanted to contact that life. The religious aspect of the book is that the mission to this planet is funded and populated by several Jesuit priests, whose response to new life was “Let’s go meet ‘em” The book begins with Father Emilio Sandoz as the only survivor of the mission to this planet, and it takes until the very end of the book for him to tell his story, both in the “present day” of the book at an inquiry, and through flashbacks told through the eyes of the different mission members.
The hardest part of this book is that you fall in love with so many of the characters, but you also know form the very beginning that they are all going to die. This isn’t fair. If everyone is going to die, you should be able to create a space between you and the characters. You shouldn’t think to yourself “I would like to meet/be friends with/simply be like these people.” You shouldn’t like them, or laugh at their jokes or enjoy watching them fall in love. It’s not fair. And I did. I like all these characters, especially Anne and George Edwards, these mid-50-somethings who are just so outgoing and hilarious. Let me give some examples. The first comes from your first interaction between Anne and Emilio, who at this point is her Latin professor.
“Are you allowed out of your room at night?” she asked. “Or do all the cute ones like you have a curfew until they’re senile?”
He flicked the ash off an air cigar and waggled his eyebrows. “What did you have in mind?”
“Well, I considered suggesting that we shatter our vows and run away to Mexico for a weekend of lust, but I’ve got homework,” she said, shouting the last word, “because some sonofabitch Latin prof thinks we should learn ablative way too soon, in my humble opinion, so why don’t you just come over for dinner on Friday night?”
Leaning back against his chair, he looked up at her with frank admiration. “Madam. How could I resist an invitation like that?” he asked. And leaning forward, “Will your husband be there?”
“Yes, dammit, but he’s very liberal and tolerant person,” Anne assured him, grinning, “And he falls asleep early.”
Or this:
“And yet,” Emilio said, “you behave like a good and moral person.”
He expected an explosion and he got it. She threw her fork down with a clatter on the plate and sad back. “You know what? I really resent the idea that the only reason someone might be good or moral is because they’re religious. I do what I do,” Anne said, biting off each word “without hope of reward or fear of punishment. I do not require heaven or hell to bribe or scare me into acting decently, thank you very much.”
Sometimes all the characters seemed a bit contrived, that everything came together too easily and cleanly. It's just to convenient that they had everything they needed, and everyone they needed in order to take a spaceship many light years away to Alpha Centauri: a person to be the doctor, and the linguist, and the ship captain, and the person who found the songs through the radio waves in the first place-"turtles put on fenceposts" they called it in the book, and that, therefore, it must have been designed by God. The final question of the book is, if God was behind all the good things, was he also behind the many ways in which the mission went wrong? Emilio spends the entire book trying to keep the truth away from his Father Superior because, he fears, that the truth will make them lose their faith much as he seems to have lost his, although the other priests on the trip with him are convinced that Emilio may very well be a saint. And I can see why they would have thought that at the time, and why Emilio, after all his suffering, would rage against that label as much as he possibly could. The book reminded me a lot of the movie Contact, and Emilio's struggle did have some parallels.
It was a difficult and dense read, and the subject matter and horrors it contained did not make it easier. I do think that it is a good modern sci-fi twist on the question of what would happen if we were faced with a "New World" to encounter and explore. I could certainly see that we would have similar difficulties were this to actually happen. And I could certainly see the Jesuits standing ready to be the first to go.
At the very end of the book, we discover the reason for the title:
“Matthew ten, verse twenty-nine,” Vincenzo Guiliani said quietly. “ ‘Not one sparrow can fall to the ground without your Father knowing it.’ “
“But the sparrow still falls,” Felipe said.
And the sparrow was Emilio Sandoz, Jesuit priest from the slums of Puerto Rico, who survived when he would have wished to die, and who was forced to tell the story of how he found and then lost his faith, and in doing so came even closer to God.
Good Reading,
Caitlin
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