Children of God by Mary Doria Russell
I read the first part of this series (‘The Sparrow’) a short while ago and loved it, so I was keen to read the sequel—-particularly as the first part didn’t exactly have a happy ending. ‘Children of God’ follows Father Emilio Sandoz back to the planet of Rakhat, several years after he returned as the only survivor of the first disastrous mission. I think that the author was trying to cater for people who hadn’t read the first book, so there’s quite a bit of scene setting and recapitulation at the start which is a little tedious if you have read the first part. However, the pace soon picks up, and it becomes completely riveting.
The story ranges widely over the themes of religion, atheism, morality, politics, but I think that it was the biology that gripped me most (for obvious reasons). Doria Russell seems to have put quite a bit of thought into the biological and ecological aspects of the book, and as a result, the Rakhati ecology is at least plausible. True, it’s impossible to guess what life on another planet would be like, but the ecology of this fictional planet is at least internally consistent and biologically believable. Rakhat has not one but two sentient species, one of which is more or less domesticated as food for the other. Imagine being able to go to a planet and not only be able to study entirely new forms of plants and animals, but also learn about the thoughts, behaviour, language and culture of two sentient species! I got pretty excited by that idea, and there’s plenty of detail for the biology nerd along with missing facts so that you can speculate on the possibilities.
One difficulty with this book was that the story is fragmented over a large number of characters and also over time. The ships taking people to and from Rakhat travel faster than light, so that there are relativity effects on the passage of time. This obviously makes the chronology of events on both Earth and Rakhat rather difficult to untangle, and there are sudden discontinuities as you jump from one story to another. It’s not a huge problem, but I did find myself racing through some parts to get back to threads about my favourite characters.
Which brings me neatly to discussing my favourite character. But I _can’t_ actually discuss her because it would be a big fat spoiler if you haven’t read the book. I will say that she gets all kinds of grief, doom and disaster heaped upon her which I didn’t think was adequately resolved. I wanted to know that she was at least content at the end, but her fate was rather summarily dealt with. This sounds like a really big criticism of the book, but it’s really just a result of having so many engaging characters—-it’s impossible to concentrate on them all. The whole thing revolves around Emilio Sandoz, so he gets most of the attention.
In the end, the main question raised by this book is how do we know that we’re doing the right thing? You can do something with good or bad intentions, and both can end in disaster. When do dramatic results justify draconian means? It’s a very thought-provoking book (don’t be put off by the title if you’re an atheist like me), and it’s well worth a read.
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Thank God - I'm an atheist too!
Might well give those two books a try, though - especially as I'm radgin' through the City library's offerings faster than they can re-stock.----- Glad you liked it - I know it took me ages to get "Sparrow", because the cover and blurb just didn't attract me.
But for some reason I kept coming back to it, and gave it a go. Very pleased that I did.
She's just released her third book, "A Thread of Grace" which is utterly unrelated to the other two. Haven't read it yet, but it's on the must-read list.
by Lyle @ 11/05/2005 8:05 am • Permalink •
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Yes, the books are quite good. I agree with you about the fragmentation over characters and time, but that's to some degree unavoidable given the scope of the story Russell is trying to tell.
(BTW, as I recall, the ships don't travel FTL. You get relativity effects at any velocity -- they're just get quite large when you're traveling some substantial fraction of the speed of light. We can only speculate what would happen time-wise if we could actually travel FTL!)
The books are a marvelous meditation on language (and I say this as a psycholinguist), technology, morality, culture, religion, and suffering. They remind me, in a curious way, of Roland Joffe's excellent 1986 film The Mission, about Jesuits trying to protect native South Americans from colonial rule (and slavery) by Portugal.
While we're all coming out, I'll say that, I, too, am an atheist (a recovering Catholic atheist, at that). The books appealed to me in part for that very reason. They ask hard questions about religion. For me, worthwhile works of fiction don't have to denounce religion as long as they look at it head-on and with clear eyes, which these books do.
by Ed @ 11/05/2005 3:06 pm • Permalink •
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Roman Candle (ex.): I hope you like it! I'd start with 'The Sparrow' to get the full story.
Lyle: I'll look out for that---she's a great writer.
Ed: [blushes] oops. Can you tell I'm not a physicist? Ahem. Moving swiftly on... The Mission---what a great film! I really enjoyed that. Even though I'm an atheist, I have nothing against religious people, or even religion, provided that they don't try to convert me or think that they have the only answers. There are lots of right answers, which is one of the things I think was handled well in the book.
by bsag @ 12/05/2005 5:06 pm • Permalink •
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