Mary Doria Russell’s “Children of God”

[rusty_halo]

http://rusty-halo.com/wordpress/?p=2782

Children of God was worse than The Sparrow. Sheesh.

It felt like an outline, not a novel. If you're going to be that ambitious, if you're going to tell a story of epic cultural change over generations and across planets, you need the writing ability to back it up, and here's it's terribly lacking. The only character who even feels like a person and not a vague sketch is Emilio, and even that is mostly leftover from the credit he earned in the first book.

I like some of the themes of this one, especially that we're morally responsible for what we choose to eat, but it turns out so sappy. It all comes down to "can't we all just get along"? Really? And they all live happily ever after, "god's children" melding, metaphorically represented by Isaac's DNA song, and then Emilio goes home and discovers that he's got a daughter and grandchild. SERIOUSLY??? It's like Russell was trying so hard to make up for the miserable ending of the first book that she drowned this one in sugar.

Not to mention that this is even more totally ripped off from Dunnett than the first. Emilio's still a pale Lymond clone, quoting classic movies, having blinding migraines, this time with bonus opiate addiction and recovery! And don't tell me that Jholaa wasn't completely stolen from Joleta with a dash of Oonagh--a beautiful sheltered noblewoman who's jealous and nasty and vicious and violent during sex? And she tries to kill her baby? Oh come ON.

It's very simplistic--in its characterizations, in its descriptions of revolution--and very transparent. I went in thinking "There is no way this author can convince me that Emilio would ever go back to Rakhat," and I was right, she couldn't. It was the most blatant authorial pulling-of-strings that I've seen in a long time, and made every character who was involved seem absolutely ridiculous.

I sort of liked the idea that it doesn't matter if there is a god, it just matters that you do what's right... but then the book undercuts that with YEAH BUT REALLY THERE IS A GOD. Ugh. *scrubs brain* I wish there had been one genuine atheist point of view in there, not just Emilio's *~*shocking*~* trauma-induced flirtation with atheism that he totally gets over because it's really so unthinkable. Seriously, lady, no matter how much you'd like to pretend, our lives are not controlled by a magical floaty dude in the sky. It's really not that shocking and unimaginable that we don't all drink your Kool-Aid.

Really, it's like she's trying so hard to explore the nature of religious faith, but every time she comes upon the possibility that there is no god, she just flits away without touching it, like she can't even engage with the idea, like literally her brain can't process it. It seems very peculiar to me that someone would write a novel about this topic without being willing to engage with atheism at all. Her arguments against it are entirely emotional--it would mean life is meaningless, it would mean these religious guys are wasting their lives, it's unthinkable--and since her emotional opposition to it is so visceral she completely fails to engage with it on a logical level.

I'm glad I got it out of the way before Gallifrey One so that I could bring along The Disorderly Knights, though. More on that soon. >:)

Current Mood: disappointed

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