ho, it was tempting to ask upon first reading The Sparrow by Mary Doria Russell, was that Masked Writer?
I mean, she isn't even young.
But smack into a range chewed dry by hacks and varmints, here she snuck up behind us, 45 years old if she was a day, without a prior SF writing credit to her name, smiling demurely; and showed us all what a beautiful engine of thought and story the old genre was, after all.
It is always good to be reminded that the engine of our dreams can still haul freight.
Among other fully merited prizes, The Sparrow got a James Tiptree Memorial Award, and the plaudits are likely to continue for a while; but the Tiptree prize is perhaps the most fitting of all, though not for its feminist examination of gender--the reason a Tiptree is usually awarded.
Gender is certainly examined, after a fashion, in The Sparrow, just as it is in Children of God, the sequel to that stunning tale of the testing-to-destruction of a Jesuit priest making First Contact on the first planet to show signs of sentient life, and being gang-raped because he failed to understand (as Children of God makes clear) that to offer to give service to poets on the planet of Rakhat is to offer to spread your cheeks, and to sweat irresistible pearls of fear and pheromone to your predator hosts.
But that--with late century SF's new-found capacity to speak directly about sex--is no more than what one might expect in an SF novel about Sleeping with Aliens: Gardner Dozois's one great novel, Strangers (1978), very similarly confronts humans with intolerable costs of not understanding that sex is encrypted.
A devastating story
What The Sparrow really won the Tiptree for (I hope) was for Russell's capacity to do what Tiptree accomplished at novella length but never in a full-length novel: to shape an entire book around a climax of story that can only be assembled through constant, incessant, unerring development; and to make this organon of story--this esemplasy, to use Coleridge's term for plastic imagination--come to a moral climax untellable except in these very terms precisely: a story devastatingly cumulative in its effects, a tale strung to the uttermost.
It is not quite the same with the sequel, which is in some ways a better novel than its predecessor, one certainly less easy (I'd have thought) for the Masked Writer to bring off; and even longer than The Sparrow. (Has it ever come to anyone's attention that Catholic writers--Russell was raised Catholic, and converted to Judaism--almost always write long? Catholic converts--G.K. Chesterton, Graham Greene, Muriel Spark--may have a tropism to the apothegmatic; but those internal aliens who were born to the Faith always seem to have to have 10 feet on the ground before they can leap over the wall into the next chapter. Funny that.)
The story is far more complicated to tell than that of The Sparrow, and no short synopsis can convey much of its imperial and unbating sweep--so perhaps at first it's enough to say that Children of God is almost impossible to put down. Mary Doria Russell is an opener of the runes: she makes it new. She takes the old old stories of SF and makes them new.
A miracle of telling
From its first words, Children of God carries on at a run from The Sparrow, and this in itself is a miracle of telling, as The Sparrow climaxed wonderfully, and seemed to stand alone, without need of furtherance. But furtherance we get. First, we come to see that Father Emilio Sandoz's rape and humiliation and tragedy in the first novel had its origins in a linguistic misunderstanding; we follow him out of the priesthood and into marriage, at which point the plot thickens and it would be unfair to anticipate Russell's careful sequencing of revelations.
Meanwhile on Rakhat, one of those presumed killed in the paroxysm of misunderstandings that ended the first novel's action on the planet, proves to have (quite plausibly) survived. Partly through the insurgency she foments, and partly through innovations laced into events by a genius poet become Paramount leader, the two precariously balanced cultures of Rakhat--one of which had long cannibalized the other as part of an intricate, rather Japanese-inflected tactic designed to stabilize populations and to maintain balance--now begin to totter, a process Russell, who is a professional anthropologist, limns with telling detail. The songs which not only pace events, but in a sense constitute the workings of life on Rakhat, exfoliate dizzyingly.
Another expedition to Rakhat is mounted. Sandoz returns. Because of relativistic differences in the passage of time, the expedition only reaches the planet after many years of radical change. Genocide is avoided. The autistic son of the survivor (Sofia Mendes) understands the world solely through song, memorizes the genetic codes of the three races into three intercalating tone-rows, and harmonizes them. Sandoz, transfixed by this music of the spheres, comes to a settlement with the God who has so tried him.
Loving characters far too much
As in The Sparrow, Children of God is an SF story about the relationship between humans (and others) and God. Russell, who never fails to write long, does carry readers into realms of religious discourse to a degree that, to a secular reader (this one), seems at times blaringly sophistical; and her habit of loving her characters far too much, combined with their agreeably interminable earnestness over questions of God's Will Et Al, does tend to impart a texture of feelgood bombination to a tale whose moral readouts are, as Russell fully intends them to be, harsh in the extreme.
But this--and the typical sf writer's priggish philistinism about music (no composer later than Saint-Saens gets mentioned by this otherwise insatiably informed and informing writer)--are the only flaws one wants to note.
The rest is a luxury of story, the river we always longed for James Tiptree Jr. to bathe in.
John Clute is a writer, editor, critic and scholar of science fiction. He is the author of the Hugo Award winning Illustrated Encyclopedia of Science Fiction and co-editor of the Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, as well as one of the co-founders of the British SF publication Interzone. His criticism and reviews have appeared in The New York Times, the Washington Post, Omni, the Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, and other places too numerous to list. His latest book, Look at the Evidence, was nominated for the 1997 Hugo Award.
