Children of God
by Mary Doria Russell

List Price: $12.95
Pages: 464
Format: Paperback
ISBN: 044900483X
Publisher: Fawcett Columbine

Mary Doria Russell received her B.A. in Cultural Anthropology from the University of Illinois-Urbana, her M.A. in Social Anthropology from Northeastern University, and her Ph.D. in Biological Anthropology from the University of Michigan-Ann Arbor. In the process of earning her degrees, Russell studied linguistics, genetics, anatomy, archaeology and geology--all of which found their way into her critically acclaimed novels.

Prior to her award-winning debut novel The Sparrow and its equally praised sequel Children of God, Russell had written only scientific articles--on subjects ranging from bone biology to cannibalism--and technical manuals for medical equipment as complex as nuclear magnetic resonance scanners. In her own words, she admits, "I had a great time, published a lot of stuff, won a bunch of awards and grants, but eventually got fed up with academia and quit." Making the transition from scientific and technical writing to fiction wasn't easy. Russell estimates, however, that "only about twenty-two anthropologists, world-wide, read my academic publications and nobody reads computer manuals, so I figured that if even just my friends read my novels, I'd be way ahead in terms of readership because I have a lot of friends."

A recent convert to Judaism, Russell has nevertheless maintained a strong connection with the Catholic education of her childhood. Asked why such a detailed look at faith in a higher power and religion in her novels, Russell explains, "I wanted to evaluate, as an adult, issues that had lain dormant for me since adolescence, to study the religion of my youth, to revisit the source of my values and ethics. That's why I chose to write about men who are collectively among the most admirable and best educated of Catholic priests, the Jesuits. Writing The Sparrow and Children of God allowed me to weigh the risks and the benefits of a belief in God, to examine the role of religion in the lives of many people."

Mary Doria Russell lives in Cleveland, Ohio, ("and likes it very much, thank you") with her husband, Don, and their son, Daniel. She is currently working on a historical thriller about the Jewish underground in Genoa during the Nazi occupation of Italy. "There are extraordinary stories of rescue and resistance in northern Italy," says Russell, "and they deserve to be better known. We've spent fifty years trying to understand what went wrong in most of Europe--it's time to look at what went right in Italy, where 80 percent of Italian Jews survived the occupation, and where thousands of European refugees found welcome and shelter and support."

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Q: How would you describe the themes of this book?

MDR: The Sparrow was about the role of religion in the lives of many people, from atheist to mystic, and about the role of religion in history, from the Age of Discovery to the Space Age. I suppose that Children of God is about the aftermath of irreversible tragedy, about the many ways that we struggle to make sense of tragedy. It's about the stories we tell ourselves, and the ways we justify our decisions, to bring ourselves to some kind of peace. And I guess it's about the way time reveals significance, strips away self-serving excuses, lays truth bare, and both blunts pain and sharpens insight.
Q: In describing your reasons for writing a sequel, you were quoted as saying, "I left my main character impaled on the horns of a dilemma, and I wasn't able to let it go at that." What was the dilemma to which you were referring?

MDR: Well, Emilio articulates this at the end of The Sparrow and in the Prelude to this book: If he accepts that the spiritual beauty and the religious rapture he experienced were real and true, then all the rest of it--the violence, the deaths, the maiming, the assaults, the humiliations--all that was God's will, too. Either God is vicious--deliberately causing evil or at least allowing it to happen--or Emilio is a deluded ape who's taken a lot of old folktales far too seriously. That may not be good theology, but at the beginning of Children of God, Emilio believes those are his only choices: bitterness or atheism, hatred or absurdity.
Q: How is that dilemma resolved in Children of God?

MDR: About a millennium ago, Maimonides wrote that whenever anything in the universe strikes us as stupid, or ugly, or absurd, it's because our breadth of knowledge is too narrow and our depth of understanding is too shallow for us to perceive God's intent. That was the theology I was drawing on in Children of God. To me, it meant that God works on a vast canvas, and He paints with time. It's only with hindsight, sometimes many generations after an event, that we see the significance of some tragedy or the importance of some obscure turning point in history. Or perhaps it just takes us that long to think up a convincing rationale for why things happened as they did, and then we ascribe it to Providence! Anyway, unlike those of us who live a normal life span, Emilio Sandoz's life span is almost tripled because of the contraction of time during the voyages to and from Rakhat. He is given the unique opportunity to see the outcome of events that seemed to be unredeemable when they happened.
Q: Why did you choose Children of God as the title for this book?

MDR: On one level, the title refers to the powerful notion that if we are all children of God, then we can become one family over time. It's very subversive, that idea--it undermines hierarchies, erodes aristocracies. It makes the discontent of the powerless and the rebellion of the disenfranchised sacred, because it implies that each soul is sovereign and of value. And it challenges its believers to build a world where the inequities of the past are less glaring and brutal. It doesn't matter if God is real or not--once the idea exists, it can change history. On another level, this book is about the revolutionary effect of children. The story begins with babies and ends with babies. There are babies born throughout the story. Even Cece the guinea pig has babies! There are children who are rejected, who are difficult to love, who are sure of their significance or ashamed of their heritage; there are children we get to know and others whose potential is only guessed at. Over time, each of them has some role to play in this unfolding drama, and on that level, the title implies that they are children of destiny, children whom God needed to complete the creation of the world He has in mind.
Q: The Sparrow received lavish praise, won numerous awards, and is still selling steadily and well. How much pressure does such success generate for you as a writer?

MDR: A ton. A ton of pressure! Now, I put most of the pressure on myself, and did so long before there was any hope that The Sparrow would ever be published. But I admit that I was terrified of getting reviews that started out, "What a disappointment after such a promising debut..." So the reaction to Children of God, particularly from readers, has been a great relief. Personally, I like The Sparrow better than the sequel, but that's evidently a minority view. I get a lot of mail, and about 80 percent of the people who write liked the second book better, as did a startling number of critics. In some ways, that's scary because I don't know what I did differently that made most people like the sequel more. Maybe it's the sense of closure--The Sparrow left you hanging. Children of God has a more peaceful ending.
Q: What's the toughest thing about writing a sequel?

MDR: I thought of Children of God as the second half of one big book. So the hard part was harmonizing the plots, letting the characters change but in ways that were consistent with who they were in The Sparrow.
Q: Novelists frequently describe how their characters take on a life of their own, moving the story line in entirely unexpected directions. Were there any similar surprises for you as you wrote Children of God?

MDR: Well, Sean Fein kind of walked into my head and started kicking butt. He was a real surprise to me, and he turned out to be just what Emilio needed. Shetri Laaks was great fun--he showed up late in the book, but he had such a strong individual voice, and he kept making me laugh. But I'd have to say that the most striking example of characters taking over was in The Sparrow. I practically made Sofia Mendes for Emilio--I was just throwing them together and I had this whole scene in my mind where Sofia would go to Emilio and say, "Serve God. Love me!" And I had a big dramatic confrontation planned, except that Sofia turned around and said, "I would never do that. I'm not stupid--I know what he'd choose, and I'd never expose myself to that kind of rejection." I'm hearing her say this, right? And I'm mentally sputtering, "But, but, but--" when Sofia says, "On the other hand, Jimmy has grown up quite a bit..." I swear, my honest reaction was, "He's too tall for you!" I was just completely flummoxed by that turn of events, but Sofia was right. And Isaac was born! Just goes to show...
Q: What do you think will be the most surprising to readers of this book?

MDR: I hope that they'll be startled by how wrong they were about Supaari when they finished reading The Sparrow. I admit it: that was a set-up. I gave readers an opportunity to make the same mistakes about Supaari that people on Earth made about Emilio Sandoz when he first came back. Everything you knew about Supaari indicated that he was a decent, honorable man who was doing his best to cope with this wholly unprecedented situation--first contact with aliens. Then he gives Emilio to the Reshtar, and you think, "That scum-sucking social climber! That miserable, no good--" But you're just as wrong about Supaari as Johannes Voelker was about Emilio Sandoz.
Q: Do you consider Children of God a darker story than The Sparrow?

MDR: Yes--it's a long dark tunnel, but it ends in the light. In The Sparrow, I had Before and After. I had the leavening of the hope and plans and the anticipation of the mission to lighten up the story. But in Children of God, it's all After. Emilio is a very angry, very bitter man, and he's much harder to love, although Gina manages it. Many of the characters from the first story spend most of the sequel hardening their views, closing their minds, more and more seduced and comforted by certainty. There is a real difference in the mood of the two books. In The Sparrow, there are a lot of one-to-one conversations. People aren't really sure of what they think, and they're willing to reveal their confusion to a friend, in order to get help in sorting things out. In Children of God, there are an awful lot of people with their minds made up, and they know that if they exposed their reasoning and decisions to anyone the least bit objective, their private cover stories would be blown. They fear disclosure, and with good reason.
Q: In Children of God Sandoz is kidnapped and dragged to Rakhat against his will. And yet, at the end of the story, he makes his peace with God and with his past experiences on Rakhat. Is one of the lessons here "the end justifies the means"?

MDR: No! A crime is a crime! The fact that the victim ultimately survives the experience and redeems it somehow does not reflect glory on the criminals for providing the victim with an opportunity to grow! Guiliani and the Pope and Danny Iron Horse are guilty of an act of utter moral bankruptcy, but each of them has managed to find a semi-plausible theological reason to justify their collusion. And they certainly aren't the first religious figures who undertake terrible deeds for high-minded reasons.
Q: Did you use any real cultures as the basis of the civilization on Rakhat?

MDR: In part, I had Romanov Russia in mind. A while ago, there was an exhibition of Faberge eggs at the Cleveland Museum of Art, and they were exquisite--just stunning, really. But even while I was admiring them, I thought, How many thousands of peasants' lives are represented by each of these eggs? How many human beings' bodies and souls were squandered in the accumulation of wealth by a single family, so that one man could give these things to his wife as Easter presents? I mean--there was a reason for the Russian revolution in 1917! The social injustices in pre-Revolutionary Russia were mindboggling. And yet, the high culture of Romanov Russia produced literature, art, music, and dance that have never been exceeded, and the culture that replaced it has been just as brutal with nothing artistic to show for its own bloodshed and injustice.

So, you can see the point here, I hope--the Runa revolution unquestionably ends an abusive and exploitative relationship with the Jana'ata, but at the cost of terrible suffering and of the brutalization of the Runa as well. And it's unclear what will replace that high culture. Even so, I meant to imply that the Runa are doing just fine, thank you. Here, I had in mind the invasion of North America by European settlers. That was unquestionably a catastrophe for the native peoples of this continent, but at the same time, it was the best damned thing that ever happened to an awful lot of immigrants from around the world. The analogy is to the fall of the Jana'ata and their replacement by the Runa--this is a catastrophe for the Jana'ata, but at the very same time, it's the best thing that ever happened to the Runa. And therein lies the tragedy.
Q: Children of God uses parallel narratives to tell its story--that of Mendes and that of Sandoz--and also jumps backward and forward in time. As a writer, what's the hardest thing about moving between these different times and narrative lines?

MDR: Trying to keep the reader oriented, and to make the jumps informative, not annoying! Chapter 21, where we listen to Danny and Suukmel's conversation, is probably the most difficult--I rewrote that chapter a dozen times trying to figure out how to encapsulate 20 years of Rakhati history as quickly and efficiently as possible. I tried a straight historical narrative, and that didn't work. I tried a lot of stuff, but ultimately the least bad solution to this narrative problem was to convey the information in a conversation between the two canniest political minds in the story. That way, in addition to describing the effects of the Kitheri revolution, I could peel back a few layers of those two characters as well. It wasn't a perfect solution, but it was the best I was able to come up with. Writing novels is not an easy game. Aside from that chapter, however, I was pretty pleased with how varying the timelines could be used to project a slanting light on events. I meant for Time itself to be, well, almost a character, in both The Sparrow and Children of God. I wanted to show how time changes perceptions, to demonstrate how little we understand things when we're in the midst of events, how much perspective the passage of time can bring.
Q: By the end of Children of God, Sofia's son Isaac makes a discovery that gives a certain meaning to the entire Rakhat venture. Does this meaning justify the suffering sparked by the mission to Rakhat?

MDR: There is a simple message to be found in that music: You are more together than you are apart. Did anyone have to suffer or die for that message to be heard? No! (Just as an aside, the Buddha's message was heard and is heard, and he didn't have to be martyred to make his point!) Isaac might just as easily have become obsessed with DNA and music while living in a peaceable Runa village. The beauty of the harmonies he discovered would have been there for the hearing, the implications of the harmony would have been there to be interpreted, even without the revolutions that took place during the same years that Isaac was involved with the DNA music.

But there is such great power in a story--and I imagine that the Rakhati of both species would be drawn to any story that made sense of the upheavals and deaths and suffering and change. They too come into the world hardwired to hear noise and make language out of it! The stories of Genesis and Exodus are so powerful that they've been told for 3500 years among Jews and adopted by Christians and Muslims all over the world. Similar stories would probably take form and take root on Rakhat, and who knows what they would sound like a few millennia down the line? I'd be willing to bet that there would be at least three versions of the story!
Q: Is there a moral to this story?

MDR: Don't be so damned quick to judge! The less we know about someone, the easier we find it to make a snap decision, to condemn or sneer or believe the worst. The closer you get, the more you know about the person or the situation in question, the harder it gets to be sure of your opinion, so remember that, and try to cut people a little slack. Like Emilio says, "Everything we thought we understood--that was what we were most wrong about." So the moral of the story is to be suspicious of your own certainty. Doubt is good.


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© Copyright 2009 by Mary Doria Russell. Reprinted with permission by Fawcett Columbine. All rights reserved.

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