The Sparrow

“Historian by profession, politician by nature, Vincenzo Giuliani had brought the Society of Jesus through difficult times, repairing some of the damage Sandoz had caused.” 

This describes the Father General, the head of the Jesuit Order. The Jesuits had sent Father Emilio and the others on a secret mission to Rakhat, hoping to reach the sentient creatures they heard. However, news of this mission leaked, and the U.N. sent its own team to Rakhat. While there, two men found Emilio naked in what appeared to be a brothel. The men assumed Emilio had been engaging in sex work, and to make matters worse, Emilio had killed a Rakhat child when they found him. News of Emilio’s behavior reached Earth long before he returned, meaning that Vincenzo Giuliani had to attempt to repair the damage that had been done to the Jesuit name, as Emilio couldn’t defend what had happened.

“But thinking it, he realized with appalling clarity that on his journey of discovery as a Jesuit, he had not merely been the first human being to set foot on Rakhat, had not simply explored parts of its largest continent and learned two of its languages and loved some of its people. He had also discovered the outermost limit of faith and, in doing so, had located the exact boundary of despair. It was at that moment that he learned, truly, to fear God.”

This moment occurs after Emilio is back on Earth and looking back at his time on Rakhat. Since he’s been back, he has been unable to talk about the details of what happened, but it’s clear that he seems to have lost his faith. In this moment, he’s saying that to lose one’s faith is to fall into despair. And yet, despite seeming to have lost his faith, he still believes in God. However, it’s clear that his feelings about God have changed. Where once he felt love and dedication, he now feels fear and, in other moments, anger.

“Sandoz required careful handling. His physical condition was so distressing and his political position so difficult that it was easy to forget how many friends this man had lost on Rakhat, how quickly the mission had gone from promise to ruin, how recent it all was for him.”

These are Father Edward Behr’s thoughts regarding Emilio. As soon as Emilio returned from Rakhat, the Jesuit Order’s primary mission was to get him to talk about what happened, hoping that his story could clear the Jesuit Order’s name in the eyes of the public. While many members of the Jesuit party look at Emilio’s recovery as business, Father Edward feels compassion toward Emilio because he sees him as a man who is suffering and in need of friendship.

“The worst symptoms of scurvy were under control, although the fatigue and bruising persisted. The doctors suspected that his ability to absorb ascorbic acid had been impaired by long exposure to cosmic radiation. There was always some kind of physiological or genetic damage in space; the miners did fairly well because they were shielded by rock, but the shuttle crews and the station staffs always had trouble with cancers and deficiency diseases.” 

This describes Emilio’s physical ailments caused by extensive space travel. However, throughout most of the novel, his health continues to decline instead of improving. This is due to the emotional trauma he experienced on Rakhat and the ensuing depression, which prevents him from having the will to get better.

“Dropping the robe off her shoulders, Anne turned to a full-length mirror. There she inspected the results of a lifetime of disciplined diet and decades of rigorous ballet classes. Her body had never been thickened by childbearing. At menopause, she’d begun hormone replacement, ostensibly because she was at risk for heart trouble and osteoporosis—a small-boned blue-eyed blonde who’d smoked for twenty years before giving it up in med school. In reality, without the compensation of children, she’d clung to the illusion of relative youth with the artificial extension of middle age. It was okay to be old, as long as she didn’t look it. All in all, she was pleased with what she saw.” 

While this moment provides a physical description of Anne, it also demonstrates the complexity of her character. Despite being 20 years older than Emilio, she is still physically attractive, and she wavers between feeling like Emilio’s mother and his potential lover (something that she knows would never happen since Emilio is celibate and she is happily married). In fact, before Sofia Mendes enters the picture, Anne is often flirtatious with Emilio. However, once it’s clear that Emilio and Sofia have feelings for each other, Anne becomes more of a mother figure to Emilio, offering him advice on how to handle the situation with Sofia.

“When Istanbul began tearing itself to rubble in the insanity that grew out of the Second Kurdish War, Sofia Mendes was thirteen. Her mother, a musician, was dead before Sofia’s fourteenth birthday: a random mortar shell in the afternoon. Within weeks, her father, an economist, was missing, probably dead as well; he went to find food and never came back to the remains of their home. Her childhood, which had been books and music and love and learning, was finished. There was no way out of the city, sealed off by U.N. troops, left to devour itself in isolation. She was alone and destitute in a world of pointless carnage.”

This describes the circumstances that led to Sofia’s sexual exploitation at the age of 14 and also reveals how she came to be an “emotional anorexic,” as Anne initially views her. Throughout most of the novel, Sofia is emotionally distant with everyone she meets. When she works as a vulture with Emilio and Jimmy, and the first few times she shares food with Anne and George, Sofia seems reluctant to even make small talk. The description above reveals why: Her ability to remain emotionally distant is what has allowed her to survive. However, once she and Anne grow close, Sofia learns how to show her emotions and let people in to her inner thoughts and feelings.

“Upon meeting Mr. Quinn for the first time, Sofia Mendes noted privately that it was evidently her day for being startled by the size of things. She was accustomed to being the smallest adult in nearly any gathering but she had never stood next to anyone as tall as Jimmy Quinn before. She had to reach up to shake his hand and momentarily felt herself to be ten years old, meeting a friend of her father’s.”

While this moment emphasizes Sofia and Jimmy’s extraordinary and opposite sizes, it’s also important because once the crew reaches Rakhat, size becomes a characteristic that confuses the creatures of Rakhat. On Rakhat, the female Runa are large, while the males are small. Due to this standard, the Runa initially mistake Jimmy for the mother of the crew and Sofia for a small male child.

“‘There is no form of death or violence that Jesuit missionaries have not met. Jesuits have been hanged, drawn and quartered in London,’ he said quietly. ‘Disemboweled in Ethiopia. Burned alive by the Iroquois. Poisoned in Germany, crucified in Thailand. Starved to death in Argentina, beheaded in Japan, drowned in Madagascar, gunned down in El Salvador.’”

This quote comes from Father General Vincenzo Giuliani. He is telling Emilio about all the ways Jesuit missionaries have died throughout the ages. Of course, Emilio would already know all of this, but Vincenzo’s hope is to get Emilio to quit feeling sorry for himself by seeing that others have suffered similarly. Emilio hasn’t yet talked about what happened to him on Rakhat, but Vincenzo knows that whatever happened to him is similar, in some ways, to the Jesuit missionaries who have previously been tortured or died on missions to foreign lands. Vincenzo hopes that reminding Emilio of the suffering of others will get him to see that at least he is still alive.

“‘Did you think you were the only one? Is it possible that you are so arrogant?’ he asked, in tones of wonderment. Sandoz was blinking rapidly now. ‘Did you think you were the only one ever to wonder if what we do is worth the price we pay? Did you honestly believe that you alone, of all those who have gone, were the single man to lose God? Do you think we would have a name for the sin of despair, if only you had experienced it?’”

Like the previous quote, this is Vincenzo’s attempt to get Emilio to quit feeling sorry for himself. This moment makes a parallel between the Jesuit mission to Rakhat and the numerous Jesuit missions that have been carried out on Earth. Many Jesuit missionaries throughout the ages have been murdered, tortured, or lost their faith while in foreign lands, among people who must have felt alien in their language and customs. Here, Vincenzo is trying to tell Emilio that he’s not special in his despair just because this despair resulted from his experiences on an alien planet.

“Unclear about her own motives, warmed by the wine and the company, she began something she thought would be familiar to him, a very old Spanish melody. To everyone’s surprise, probably even his own, Emilio left his corner, came to the side of the piano, and began to sing in a clear light tenor.”

Here, Sofia is playing the piano at Anne and George’s one evening. After she begins playing a song especially for Emilio, he sings along, and it’s clear that the two are sharing an intimate moment. This makes Jimmy jealous because he recognizes Sofia and Emilio’s obvious connection, and, of course, Jimmy is not so secretly in love with Sofia.

“It was vocal, mainly. There was a percussive underlayment and possibly wind instruments as well, but it was hard to tell about that—there was still a lot of noise, although Jimmy had already filtered some out. And it was unquestionably alien.”

Jimmy is the first one to find the alien voice recordings while working his usual job at Arecibo, and this moment describes the nature of the recording. It’s clear that the recording is alien singing, which means that a neighboring planet has sentient life.

“Jimmy replayed it. Sitting at the edge of the group, almost in the hallway just beyond Jimmy’s little space, Sofia watched Sandoz, seeing in action the process she had abstracted while working for the Jesuits in Cleveland. He was already beginning to mouth a little of it, picking up phrases sung by the chorus, trying out phonemes.”

This moment occurs right after Jimmy hears the alien recording for the first time. He immediately invites Anne, George, Emilio, and Sofia to his office in the middle of the night to hear the recording. This moment is significant because it demonstrates Emilio’s skill at learning new languages, even an alien language.

“Lying in bed, that warm August night, he felt no Presence. He was aware of no Voice. He felt as alone in the cosmos as ever. But he was beginning to find it hard to avoid thinking that if ever a man had wanted a sign from God, Emilio Sandoz had been hit square in the face with one this morning, at Arecibo.”

This moment occurs after Emilio hears the alien voices at Arecibo for the first time. Before hearing the voices, Emilio admitted to being agnostic in his faith toward God: He believed God existed but never believed in the miracles of Jesus. However, after hearing the alien voices, he likens this moment to hearing directly from God in that he feels like he has a clear purpose: He is meant to go to Rakhat and reach these creatures.

“Sofia Mendes had kept her distance from men since that final night with Jaubert—too much, too early. Even so, she found the idea of priestly celibacy barbaric. What she knew of Catholicism was repellent, with its persecutions, its focus on death, on martyrdom, its central symbol an instrument of Roman criminal justice, appalling in its violence.”

Here, Sofia, Jewish by birth, describes her views concerning Catholicism and, in particular, celibacy. 

“He thought sometimes of the peculiar peacefulness he’d experienced toward the end of the voyage back, watching blood seep from his hands and thinking, This will kill me, and then I can stop trying to understand.”

This moment describes Emilio’s only moment of peace after leaving Rakhat. Throughout the novel, he often wishes he had died instead of lived, and this moment describes why. Ever since losing everything on Rakhat, Emilio seems to have also lost his faith in God, which he equates to despair. In this way, he says it would have been better to die than to be left alone with his memories and no explanation as to why it all happened.

“So many martyrs like Isaac Jogues. Trekking eight hundred miles into the interior New World—a land as alien to a European in 1637 as Rakhat is to us now, Giuliani suddenly realized. Feared as a witch, ridiculed, reviled for his mildness by the Indians he’d hoped to gain for Christ. Beaten regularly, his fingers cut off joint by joint with clamshell blades—no wonder Jogues had come to Emilio’s mind.”

In this moment, Vincenzo is making the connection between the Jesuit martyr Isaac Jogues and Emilio. Both men went to foreign lands and were tortured by the people/creatures they hoped to save. While this moment makes a larger commentary about the purpose and nature of mission trips, it’s also important because, although there are similarities between Isaac and Emilio, the most obvious difference is how each man handles the aftermath of his experience. After Isaac was rescued from his torture, he recovered, only to go back to the New World to try to save the Indigenous people one more time, and was brutally murdered instead. For Emilio, rather than finding purpose in his experience, he just wishes he had died. 

“After a while it became hard to ignore how, against all odds, the dice kept coming up in favor of the mission.”

The mission to Rakhat seems extremely improbable in that it should have been too expensive and harbored too many unknowns. However, somehow, Emilio and his friends—three Jesuit priests, an anthropologist/doctor, a computer programmer, and a space engineer—ultimately end up on Rakhat. This is why Emilio originally thinks it was the will of God for them to go to the planet, and it’s also why, when things go horribly wrong, he ends up blaming God and losing his faith.

“It was then that she experienced an instant of unprecedented clarity, a moment of wholly unanticipated certainty that God was real.”

Similar to the previous quote, in which Emilio begins to fully believe in God for the first time once they’ve arrived on Rakhat, here, Anne, previously an agnostic, also begins to believe in God’s existence while on the way to Rakhat. This perception that God allowed the mission to come together is initially invigorating for the crewmembers because they feel like they really have a purpose being on the planet. But as things fall apart, the crewmembers begin to question everything, including their faith. This tension between the idea of God’s will versus human volition becomes an important theme in the novel.

“Emilio could be so casual and funny that you forgot sometimes that he was a priest and it came as a surprise when you saw his face during the Mass, or watched him doing something ordinary extraordinarily well, in that Jesuit way of making everyday labor a form of prayer. But even Jimmy could see that Emilio and Sofia would be good for each other and that their children would be beautiful and bright and beloved. And, following in the footsteps of centuries of compassionate Catholics before him, Jimmy now wondered why guys like Emilio had to make a choice between loving God and loving a woman like Sofia Mendes.”

This moment, while describing parts of Emilio’s character, also reveals one of the many tensions of the novel: the love triangle between Jimmy, Sofia, and Emilio. Despite Emilio’s vow of priestly celibacy, he is clearly in love with Sofia. Sofia, likewise, is smitten by Emilio, although she keeps her feelings hidden. And then there’s Jimmy, who is in love with Sofia. In this quote, despite his feelings, Jimmy acknowledges that Emilio and Sofia would make an amazing couple, as they are both intelligent, witty, and share an unspoken chemistry. Also in this quote is the questioning of why a priest must choose between the love of God and the love of a woman, a theme that comes up consistently throughout the novel.

“For he could not feel God or approach God as a friend or speak to God with the easy familiarity of the devout or praise God with poetry. And yet, as he had grown older, the path he had started down almost in ignorance had begun to seem clearer to him. It became more apparent to him that he was truly called to walk this strange and difficult, this unnatural and unutterable path to God, which required not poetry or piety but simple endurance and patience.”

Here, while on Rakhat, before things go bad, Emilio ponders the celibacy he has lived since he was a teenager. While he admits that he has never experienced God, he decides that his celibacy has been worth it, as it is his own path to God. He realizes that he is not like other men, who might experience God through poetry or close friendship, but instead he feels closest to God through his willful act of endurance and patience as it relates to celibacy. In subsequent chapters, Emilio admits that he had always secretly left the door open between himself and Sofia, but after realizing that he is truly called to a life of celibacy from God, he shuts that door, allowing Sofia to finally choose to love Jimmy.

“Smiling and in love with God and all His works, Emilio at last held out his arms and Askama settled happily into his lap, thick-muscled tapering tail curling comfortably around her as she nestled down and watched him greet the other children and begin to learn their names in the tripled sunshine that broke through the clouds. He felt as though he were a prism, gathering up God’s love like white light and scattering it in all directions, and the sensation was nearly physical, as he caught and repeated as much of what everyone said to him as he could, soaking up the music and cadence, the pattern of phonemes on the fly, gravely accepting and repeating Askama’s quiet corrections when he got things wrong.”

This is the first time Emilio and the crewmembers encounter the Runa creatures on Rakhat. The Runa don’t seem to notice that Emilio and the others are from another planet, and instead, the Runa try to communicate with the humans. The Runa are a trading species, which means that they are used to encountering strange creatures who speak foreign languages. It is a peaceful experience, and this is the first time Emilio actually feels God’s love in a physical way. This is also an important moment because, once again, it demonstrates Emilio’s extraordinary ability to learn new languages. Here, Askama, a little Runa girl, is sitting on Emilio’s lap, trying to teach him the Runa language while also learning his language.

“Eventually, I came to understand that the Runa do not have a vocabulary for the edges that we perceive separating one element from another. This reflects their social structure and their perceptions of the physical world and even their political status.”

This quote comes from Emilio and demonstrates one of the many differences between the Runa and humans. The two main species on Rakhat are the Runa and the Jana’ata. The Runa are a close-knit, herd-like species who are vegetarians. The Jana’ata, on the other hand, have social hierarchies amongst themselves and are carnivores. Before each species evolved into sentience, the Jana’ata used to hunt the Runa. However, the Jana’ata have now declared themselves rulers over Rakhat. They mandate population control by monitoring when and how the Runa breed, and they also monitor their own reproduction. If the Runa reproduce without the Jana’ata’s consent, they confiscate the Runa babies and eat them. The humans find this deeply disturbing since the Runa are just as intelligent as the Jana’ata and also far outnumber them. The humans can’t understand why or how the Runa let this happen.

“The trouble with illusions, he thought, is that you aren’t aware you have them until they are taken from you.”

This quote comes from Emilio after he’s back on Earth and has been told that the physical pain he’s experiencing in the aftermath of space travel will never fully go away. This moment also describes Emilio’s spiritual state. He initially felt like the mission to Rakhat was God’s will, and before tragedy struck there, he felt close to God for the first time in his life. However, after all of his friends die and he’s left alone and tortured, Emilio feels like his faith has been ripped away and that his feelings toward God—and perhaps God Himself—have been an illusion all along.