Children of God - Mary Doria Russell

Children of God (Mary Doria Russell, 1998)

I was excited to learn The Sparrow had a sequel, though it's not so much a sequel as a direct narrative continuation. It starts where the first novel leaves off, and early on I was just as entranced as I had been by The Sparrow. However, where The Sparrow is powerfully focused, Children of God suffers from multiple personality disorder. The scattershot plot and jumpy timeline prevent a high level of character development, and the characters we have left over from The Sparrow change almost beyond recognition.

I do think it's worth a read if you've read The Sparrow, so I won't spoil any of the better parts, but I will say this: the book lost me when Sandoz withdraws from the priesthood and starts a romance. To me, that seems completely out of character, and it gives the lie to the otherwise debilitating side effects of his interplanetary experience, which, though they were letting up at the end of The Sparrow, persist throughout Children of God to the point of artificiality. Sure, bad things happened to the guy, but he doesn't have a monopoly on suffering by any means.

The plot starts out promising. The Jesuits are preparing to send a second mission to the planet Rakhat, and they want Emilio to teach the languages to the new group, secretly hoping he will consent to return with them. Meanwhile on Rakhat, the legacy of the first mission results in serious changes to the structure of the society. Traveling at the speed of light, the second mission will arrive on a Rakhat that is thirty-five years removed from Emilio's departure, and those thirty-five years play out in ways the first mission could never have foreseen.

I think I would have enjoyed the book more if it had a clear direction. The problem is, it's about too many things: loneliness, regret, violence, political upheaval, revolution, survival, destruction of one culture, evolution of another. Even autism, genetics, and music play significant roles in the narrative, not to mention a whole host of new characters we barely have time to meet. With so many disparate and competing elements, it's more a catalog of events than a story. Still, it is well-written, and I did enjoy it for the most part, despite the character dissonance mentioned earlier.

Arbitrary rating: 3.5 out of 5 apostate Jesuits