The Sparrow (book)

Driving to work I saw a woman at the bus stop wearing a sweatshirt reading, “Bad Choices Make Good Stories.” Mary Doria Russell’s acclaimed novel, The Sparrow (1996) tells the story of a man with the best of intentions who paves his own road to hell.

Sandoz

When radio signals are found to be emanating from the Alpha Centauri system, the Society of Jesuits send a team to explore this “new world.” As always happens when civilizations meet, mistakes are made.

Our protagonist is Emilio Sandoz, a priest and the expedition linguist. Born and raised in Puerto Rico, Sandoz had a rough upbringing and through the intervention of the Church was one of the few in his family to escape a cycle of destitution and crime.

When the expedition reaches the source of the transmissions, the planet Rakhat, the once skeptical Sandoz comes to believe that God has indeed chosen him to first meet the natives of this planet and to unite His children.

Tragic misunderstandings follow and Sandoz eventually returns to earth; tortured, maimed, near death and in despair. He is torn between the belief that either there is no God, or that God exists and and that He is (as Jeb Bartlet would put it) a feckless thug.

Russell

The Sparrow was Russell’s first novel. The year 1992 was the quadricentennial of the arrival of Columbus in the Americas. An anthropologist, she was unconvinced by all those who speculated that if the early settlers from Europe had only not been so ignorant, the Western experiment may have gone much less tragically -- that is was a mistake we would never make again.

The book was summer reading for me in 2001. My wife and I were taking a vacation in Britain. The trip was last-minute, we hadn’t intended to travel anywhere that summer. We intended to have a newborn child. Deus vult.

That fall I saw Russell speak at Wooster College. She said one of her inspirations was the tale of one who lost his wife in a traffic accident. He’d fallen asleep at the wheel and the passenger side of his car was sheared off by a truck. His wife was killed, he was barely touched.

It was entirely the man’s fault, you see. His wife had asked perhaps twenty minutes before the accident if he was tired, and suggested they stop, but he wanted to press on. After the tragedy he said he was grateful to be an atheist because while he could comprehend the senselessness and grief of this horrifying loss, he couldn’t imagine believing in a God who would have any reason for this to have happened.

At that time I was still reeling from our stillbirth, and I took comfort myself in that thought. Many had told us that God loved our son so much He needed him in heaven. Its is a sentiment I still find heartless and repellent.

Carroll

John Carroll University

A twentieth anniversary edition of The Sparrow was released this year. The story moves back and forth between two timelines; the events as they occur and also as they are recounted decades later. Though we receive some biographic background on Sandoz, the action truly begins as he and another character meet for the first time in a coffee shop near the campus of John Carroll University in 2016.

Russell's tale begins twenty years into her own future.

She also set this important opening bit in University Heights, which is totally awesome because all great and terrible journeys begin in the Cleveland area. (Ms. Russell lives in Lyndhurst.)

Reading fiction set in the not-too-distant future can be challenging as certain technologies have or have not developed or come to pass. Fortunately this was composed just as the Internet was gaining prominence, an element which must be the most significant detail absent from most twentieth century works of science fiction.

We can’t all be Orson Scott Card (Ender’s Game, 1985) or E.M. Forster (The Machine Stops, 1909) to name two authors who predicted the “world wide web” but Russell was keen enough to note that most if not all information and media was soon to be transferred through what is here commonly referred to as "the nets.”

Most prescient are the existence and everyday use of ROM-tablets which you and I today would actually refer to as simply a tablet.

Pitt

The book has been optioned for a film on two previous occasions. Universal wanted Antonio Banderas to play Emilio Sandoz, and though I personally would have found him a bit too Hollywood handsome for a character I see as a slightly diminutive scrapper (he is described many times as being less than average height) theirs was a much better choice than the man Warners Brothers tapped -- Brad Pitt.

Pitt was looking for good projects for his new production company, and while I admire his work in practically everything I’ve ever seen him in, simply put he’s not a Latino. Ten years ago, and basically since the film industry began, this wasn’t an issue. Today it is, and thankfully so. People of color and their allies have made great inroads, pressuring film corporations who adapt novels and comic books to cast popular characters with actors who represent their ethnic heritage.

Just this week Disney announced they are scrapping a treatment of their live-action adaptation of Mulan which was told from the point of view of a white European sailor. Word is they are now looking specifically for an Asian director.

Russell’s description of Sandoz’s difficult childhood in La Perla is rich and significant, and deeply important to his character. The decisions he made, not the largest of boys or men, that he survived his childhood and stayed out of prison with his remarkable intellect and toughness. That this man joined the priesthood and his ability with languages took him around the world, and then across space. She created a proud Puerto Rican to be the hero of her story. Not Brad Pitt.

Muñoz

Javier Muñoz

Reading the book again in 2016, I had a very clear picture of Emilio Sandoz, of what he looks like. I cannot remember who I pictured fifteen years ago, but now I couldn’t think of anyone else. It was Javier Muñoz, who we had seen play the title role in Hamilton on Broadway last August.

Once the designated alternate for Lin-Manuel Miranda, Muñoz is now the star of the biggest show on Broadway. He has been praised for bringing a “cutting carnal edge” to the role and has gained the nickname Sexy Hamilton.

His comfortable sexuality combined with a fierce determination now drives the show in a way Miranda did not. Don’t get me wrong, Miranda’s ambition in the role is undeniable, but so is his inherent childlike sweetness which is even more apparent now that he has cut his hair after leaving the role. Did you see SNL last week? The guy looks like he’s 25 again. Sigh.

The defined line of his cheek gives Muñoz the look of hungry yearning and he has a wide smile that is both inviting and challenging. Sandoz has a habit of putting his hands to his head and pulling his fingers back through his hair, and Muñoz has that hair. In my imagination, Javier Muñoz became the face of Emilio Sandoz.

He and Miranda worked together on In The Heights, and Muñoz first took over the lead role in that show on Broadway from Miranda as well. It is my fantasy that Miranda would secure the rights for The Sparrow to adapt into a musical, but that he create the lead specifically from Muñoz to play.

Currently, however, the rights are held by AMC which may or may not eventually produce a series.

Calvin

I remember the night I finished the book, lying in bed at my brother’s home in Battersea. I lie awake for maybe an hour in the dark, staring up into the starless sky through wide open window at the head of our bed, contemplating Sandoz’s loss, his feelings of abandonment, the destruction of his hope and his complete and utter sadness. I did not revel in the feeling, but it did provide a certain perspective. As the story draws to a conclusion we do believe there is the possibility of hope. There must always be hope.

The title comes from the New Testament, Matthew 10:29. The King James Version reminds us, "Are not two sparrows sold for a farthing? And one of them shall not fall on the ground without your Father."

The Annunciation Triptych, Rogier van der Weyden (1434)

Hamlet also refers to this passage in Act V, scene 2, when he warns Horatio against acting to alter fate. "There is special providence in the fall of a sparrow," he says. His audience would have known the verse.

Some say the same man composed both lines, but well.

The message is, nothing happens without God being aware of it. Without His knowledge. Without His knowledge and His implied consent.

To wit; “That baby was never meant to live.”

In I Hate This I recount a moment my brother and I had before "The Annunciation Triptych" at The Cloisters (in the Heights!) The vision of the Holy Ghost, tiny and white like a fetal baby Jesus, sailing down towards the unknowing Mary, the baby clutching a cross, heading into the womb “equipped with the means of his own death.” In this image I understood the verse in its Biblical context, with Jesus as the sparrow, in this painting falling to earth.

Why did Jesus need to die? Why does anyone?

Deus vult. God wills it.

Sources:
In Hamilton Javier Munoz Puts A Different Spin On The Title Role, Ben Brantley, The New York Times 11/30/2015
'Mulan' Mania: Disney, Sony Hunt for Asian Directors to Helm Rival Action Pics, Rebecca Ford, The Hollywood Reporter, 10/12/2016
MaryDoriaRussell.net