The Sparrow.

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.

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. Sandoz has been accused of heinous crimes and his brother Jesuits, while trying to keep the press at bay, are deciding how to proceed. "He's salvageable," the father general thinks to himself. "It's not as though we have so many priests that we can write one off without an effort....And what right have we to declare the mission a failure?" Thus begins a painstaking endeavor to get Sandoz to explain the events surrounding the reported crimes on Rakhat. 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.

The impetus for the intergalactic journey was the detection, at a Puerto Rican observatory, of beautiful music being broadcast through space. Russell's narrative switches back and forth between Sandoz's return to earth in 2059 and a period forty years earlier when the mission was first conceived. The first transitions between present and past are somewhat jarring and confusing, but as the plot unfolds the mission story draws the reader into the relationships and interior lives of Russell's finely drawn characters.

The author clearly has done her research on the early historic Jesuit missions and on Jesuit spirituality. In the background of all of her Jesuit characters stand Ignatius of Loyola, Matteo Ricci, and Isaac Jogues. She successfully updates the stories of these important Jesuits who made decisions either to send men to distant lands or went themselves to foreign cultures as representatives of Christianity. 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 planets, uncertain if they would ever set foot back in Europe. Russell's missionary story includes not only four Jesuits, but also a mature married couple, a young scientist, and a Sephardic Jewish woman. By updating the missionary stories of the past, Russell focuses the reader's attention on questions about the nature of missionary work, whether it is conducted by explorers, scientists, business people, or religious. What does it mean to encounter people at least superficially so different from ourselves? What does missionary experience do to our prejudices, desires, and cultural expectations?

An important element in Russell's novel are questions about the sacredness of friendship. 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 religious life. "You are not alone," one of the characters tells Sandoz near the end of the novel. Unlike characters in many contemporary novels who find themselves ultimately isolated in the world, these men and women continue to reach out to one another despite the uncertainty of God's presence and their own limited ability to communicate with one another.

Russell subtly raises concerns about the ways in which "sophisticated" cultures tell themselves cover stories in order to justify actions taken at a terrible cost to others. The reader first encounters 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 institution of "intellectual prostitution." Her enslavement is seen as a justifiable cost of doing business, and it is only questioned by outsiders. This issue arises 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 created the beautiful music heard on earth. Ironically, in light of Russell's interest in cross-cultural interaction, one disturbing aspect of the novel is her stereotypical depiction of the Japanese characters, almost all of whom are portrayed as ruthless businessmen.

According to the endnotes, Russell is a trained biological anthropologist who has researched craniofacial biomechanics and also archeological evidence of cannibalism. As one reads her vivid descriptions 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. In The Sparrow the reader encounters an exotic culture and environment familiar enough to make sense of yet elusive enough to disorient and to enchant. Even when humans venture into space, Russell reminds 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.

Paul Q. Kane, S.J., is co-director of Kateri Northwest Ministry Institute, a ministry training program among native peoples based in Spokane, Washington.