The Sparrow

...Her enslavement is seen as a justifiable cost of doing business, and it is only questioned by outsiders...

...The reader first en-counters this in the character of Sophia Mendes, who is indentured to a business corporation and must buy her freedom from what she herself describes as an in-stitution of "intellectual prostitution...

...Russell's nar-rative switches back and forth between Sandoz's return to earth in 2059 and a period forty years earlier when the mission was first conceived...

...As one reads her vivid de-scriptions of the planet Rakhat and its flora, fauna, and rational inhabitants, it is easy to see how Russell brought her expertise to bear on the story...

...Russell's missionary story includes not only four Jesuits, but also a mature married couple, a young scientist, and a Sephardic Jewish woman...

...The story opens in Rome in the year 2059, where the disgraced lone survivor of the Rakhat mission, Emilio Sandoz, is recovering in a hospital under the care of the father general of the Society of Jesus...

...According to the endnotes, Russell is a trained biological anthropologist who has researched craniofacialbiomechan-ics and also archeological evidence of cannibalism...

...Thus begins a painstaking endeavor to get Sandoz to explain the events surround-ing the reported crimes on Rakhat...

...Russell subtly raises concerns about the ways in which "sophisticated" cul-tures tell themselves cover stories in order to justify actions taken at a terri-ble cost to others...

...In the background of all of her Jesuit charac-ters stand Ignatius of Loyola, Matteo Ricci, and Isaac Jogues...

...Paul Q. Kane Among other attributes, a good work of fiction should leave the reader asking questions: questions about who we are and about the world in which we live, questions about faith and the passions which direct our choices...

...Maria Doria Russell's debut novel, The Sparrow, raises such questions through an ingenious and haunting tale of a Jesuit-led expedition to a distant planet, Rakhat, in the twenty-first century...

...Unlike characters in many contemporary novels who find them-selves ultimately isolated in the world, these men and women continue to reach out to one another despite the uncer-tainty of God's presence and their own limited ability to communicate with one another...

...As the story unfolds we learn how all of those on the Jesuit missionary expedition had been forced to confront questions of theodicy and agnosticism...

...She successful-ly updates the stories of these important Jesuits who made decisions either to send men to distant lands or went them-selves to foreign cultures as represen-tatives of Christianity...

...The impetus for the intergalactic jour-ney was the detection, at a Puerto Rican observatory, of beautiful music being broadcast through space...

...In telling conversations and touching moments of intimacy, the Jesuits and their friends work out the possibilities for tenderness, the desire for affection, and the role of celibacy in re-ligious life...

...Sandoz has been accused of hein-ous crimes and his brother Jesuits, while trying to keep the press at bay, are de-ciding how to proceed...

...And what right have we to declare the mission a failure...

...You are not alone," one of the characters tells Sandoz near the end of the novel...

...This issue aris-es again when the missionaries come into contact with the Runa, who are simple, nonviolent beings living in the Rakhat countryside, and the Jana'ata, who are the sophisticated city dwellers who cre-ated the beautiful music heard on earth...

...In The Spar-row the reader encounters an exotic cul-ture and environment familiar enough to make sense of yet elusive enough to disorient and to enchant...

...Even when hu-mans venture into space, Russell re-minds us, we will continue to struggle with questions of God, the difficulties and ambiguities of human relationships, and the hubris that casts the "other" into the outer darkness...

...The author clearly has done her re-search on the early historic Jesuit mis-sions and on Jesuit spirituality...

...The first tran-sitions between present and past are somewhat jarring and confusing, but as the plot unfolds the mission story draws the reader into the relationships and in-terior lives of Russell's finely drawn characters...

...An important element in Russell's novel are questions about the sacredness of friendship...

...What does it mean to en-counter people at least superficially so different from ourselves...

...What does missionary experience do to our prejudices, desires, and cultural expectations...

...It's not as though we have so many priests that we can write one off with-out an effort...

...He's salvage-able," the father general thinks to himself...

...Ironically, in light of Russell's interest in cross-cultural interaction, one disturb-ing aspect of the novel is her stereotypical depiction of the Japanese characters, almost all of whom are portrayed as ruth-less businessmen...

...By updating the missionary stories of the past, Russell focuses the reader's atten-tion on questions about the nature of mis-sionary work, whether it is conducted by explorers, scientists, business people, or religious...

...When Ignatius sent his friend Francis Xavier to India or when Jogues traveled to New France (Canada), it must have seemed as though these men were going to distant plan-ets, uncertain if they would ever set foot back in Europe...