Mary Doria Russell's new novel, Children of God, takes on two big subjects: revolution and theodicy. Since cynicism about politics is the dominant take of US culture these days, it is refreshing to read an engaging, positive treatment of organized political action that overthrows a seemingly intransigent, naturalized system of slavery. The author's sympathetic and dramatic conceptualization ensures that just about any reader will be rooting for the revolutionaries. The second subject, theodicy, did not vanish with the publication of Voltaire's Candide; the many instances of large-scale, systematic slaughter in the name of purity, one of the most prominent features of twentieth-century history, must certainly trouble any believer in a God held to be more than a personal abstraction. Since many late twentieth-century Jesuits have committed themselves to the struggles of oppressed peoples and have witnessed and sometimes experienced the hell-on-earth of political detention and torture, it is appropriate to place Jesuits at the heart of a novel focusing on these issues.




Russell's leading Jesuit character, Emilio Sandoz, is interesting and likeable. And Russell's treatment of him is so warm and generous and empathetic that however one might feel about a self-abnegating woman (a nurse and mother who is so psychically self-contained that she survives battering without wound or scar) whose sole reason for existing in a book is to heal the male protagonist, the reader cannot help but be drawn along, unresisting, through the process a survivor of torture traverses. One can only root for the character's return to health and wish him a happy life cultivating-- like Candide-- his own garden.


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