But Mary Doria Russell is a paleo-anthropologist who speaks six languages and has written scientific papers on bone formation you get the feeling that when she plays with narrative logic it's intentional.
To broadcast their singing four light years across the galaxy. Not least when the aliens live in an apparently low-tech world but are able It would be very easy to pick holes in Mary Doria Russell's basic plot.Īfter all, planets that have conveniently Earth-like atmospheres, abundant plants that are edible to humans and roughly human-sized bipedal aliens that can learn English are easy to criticise. Before ex-slumkidĮmilio lands on the distant planet and years afterwards, when his tortured,Ĭhrist-like body is returned in a hollowed-out asteroid to be kept alive by the Jesuits, while the world's media camp outside trying to discover whether the half-dead priest is, as many of the landing party thought, really a saint or just a sexually-depraved child murderer. This is a tragedy seen from two angles, before and after. The team that Emilio collects together is beautifully drawn, entirely believable and utterly, fatally flawed. The universe, the Jesuits do what they do best, send a mission into spaceĪgainst all odds, not to convert the aliens but to learn from them. A fact it takes a while to recognise as the book is thick with concrete detail, the shapes of objects, the tastes of food and textures of clothes.įaced with the prospect that God might have more than one set of children in How or why this music is broadcast is never clearly explained, but then very little is explained in The Sparrow. Only this time the New World is literally a new world, another planet setįour light years away in Alpha Centauri whose inhabitants attract the interest of Earth by broadcasting their hauntingly beautiful, quasi-religious music into space. Mirrors the greater story of Western Civilisation from the dawn of the New World The small and personal story of polyglot Jesuit missionary Emilio Sandoz There's a tastefully blurred montage on the front of a sparrow set against a nebula in a night sky and the book is issued in B format under Transworld's literary Black Swan imprint. It certainly isn't packaged as SF, at least not in the UK market. There are books born to win prizes and this is one of them. The Sparrow by Mary Doria Russell (Black Swan, £6.99, paperback, 1998. Mary Doria Russell: The Sparrow - an infinity plus review
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