It might be conceited to say something akin to “I have gone beyond religion”, but that is how I feel about it. I had my struggles with religion when I was younger, and came out on the side of a pretty strong atheist. I don’t actually like talking about it, and I don’t actually like taking about religion generally.
I came across The Sparrow not as a religious novel, but because someone had advertised it as a first contact novel. That is what I was interested in. It was unfortunately not what I got.
The Sparrow is a first contact novel of sorts. Humanity finds a signal from the stars and they go exploring. What makes this strange is that the Vatican is spearheading this. This was written in the 90’s, but even then I feel like this notion should have struck a lot of people as a bit silly. The Vatican sends a linguistic up there, and the massive problem of how that linguistic gap is bridged is never addressed. The protagonist meets good aliens, bad aliens, and has some pretty horrific things happen to him that leaves him questioning the nature of god and the problem of evil.
Ho hum.
I didn’t care for this book, and it wasn’t entirely because of its religious core. The disjointed timelines put a lot of very boring things at the front of the book, enough so that I was left wondering when the book would stop being a religious diatribe and start actually being science fiction. They style is slow and ponderous, but a lot of it is characters internal musings, with not a lot of external description. I didn’t care for that either. I watched a few YouTube reviews of this book both before and after reading it and I noticed something I found somewhat peculiar – anything that the reviewers went over in terms of plot points is literally only contained in the second half of the book. In that this was a slow and ponderous read, by the time I got there, I could barely remember what the first part of the book contained. Frankly, I don’t think it contained much. The fate of the protagonist, although it happens in the middle of the narrative, is all stuffed into the last chapter in a way that stuck me as very hastily put together. It felt like the author wanted to write about a bunch of people musing about religion, and stuck a sci-fi frame at the end of it all. An editor should have looked at this and called it a short story. The utter lack of detail about what the protagonist goes through does not help at all. His pain was cheapened by the retelling, but I also feel that it didn’t make reams of sense. Because the secondary alien species – the one that commits the crime against the protagonist – is so poorly explored in the narrative, the offending act feels like little more than what a sheltered 90’s christian woman could best fathom as a poor fate.
I can think of worse.
People make much of this as a sort of philosophical novel. I don’t think it is. It might be for a religious person, and they can have their go at it. At the core of the novel, is the problem of evil – a famous philosophical/theological problem that asks why an omnipotent and omniscient god allows evil to exist in the world. It is a tough question for believers, and has a different answer for every faith and belief out there. The thing is that the problem isn’t a problem for the non-believer – without a god, there isn’t really a problem of evil. Evil exists, and there is no higher power to step in and stop it. Please deal with this however you like.
For the non-believer, the problem of evil is something akin to Unicorn overpopulation – something to worry about only if you actually believe in unicorns.
Ok, I don’t love this review. I don’t relish being this mean to written works, but everything about this was not working for me.
Failures in Polymathy 