Book Review: The Sparrow

***BOOK SPOILERS AHEAD!!!***

It's interesting that I automatically assume that more philosophical types have motivations and understandings that I couldn't possibly fathom. When it turns out that they don't... I'm relieved, enlightened, and disappointed that I wasn't in over my head. I don't claim to thoroughly understand, but I don't feel completely mystified.

I fell in love with the characters of Mary Doria Russell's The Sparrow. I marveled at the results of the author's worldbuilding efforts. I envied her linguistic facility. But... Maybe I've been desensitized. I felt like my values and the authors values were not quite resonating in harmony, and that I wasn't as shocked and touched, as an audience member, as she expected. I even perceived a slight sort of pompous reliance upon over-researched historical and cultural references. I often wondered whether she was wielding these references properly, but I lack the knowledge to determine so.

What this book drives home for me is the significance of perspective. We aren't simply creatures walking and breathing and living and dying in a world that happens to us. That's a large part of it, and returning to that fact is sometimes refreshing, but I think, overall, we're products of our own perceptions. I get unreasonably irritated when happy, upbeat people tell depressed, anxious people to get some Prozac and wake up to reality. Whose is the reality? I know this sounds like a huge duh, but bear with me. There is no reality, really, that exists without our minds. The journeys that we take to make sense of the input mark the significance of the events of our lives.

To some extent, as a reader, I felt like the author was trying to encourage her audience to accept a particular reality as given, and that I personally bucked against this encouragement. I wasn't sure how the book was going to conclude as I approached the ending, but when it concluded, I felt inexplicably jarred, and I don't yet know why.

I tend to have suspicions that I'm not capable of comprehending things that others are, or that my powers of empathy are not strong enough to elicit truly thoughtful, educated, illuminated responses in me - and I accept that and throw it out there as a possible explanation for my reaction to this book. Another might be the fact that I fear that God is just a product of our perceptions.

I haven't said anything here about the perceptual journeys of the characters, but they are fascinating. I'll let you draw your own conclusions about them.