Children of God / Mary Doria Russell / 1998 / 436 pp

This novel is vast and sweeping but I found it ultimately unsatisfying. I liked the sci-fi aspects of the plot: Jesuits and scientists travel on a mission of goodwill to a newly discovered planet inhabited by two intelligent species. Jesuits supply $, scientists supply brains. The species turn out to be preying on each other, and the humans' interference is totally misread, resulting in the last surviving member of the expedition, a priest, being physically mutilated and repeatedly raped by the dominant species (by the aliens' account, this is not a bad thing; he requested he be treated as a "alien noun we had heard them using and thought meant visiting dignitary" but that actually means "i submit to being your slave, mutilate me and rape me to show me that you own me", so hey, he asked for it). The priest is eventually rescued and travels back to Earth, where the Jesuits force him to be their linguist. He's the only one who knows the alien languages; the Jesuits want to use him to gain economic power in the trade relationship.

Anyway the most of the novel is dedicated to Jesuit priesthood minutiae, memories of rape which the priest cannot get rid of, and attempts by the priest to get out of working with the aliens. He gets kidnapped and taken back to the planet by nefarious humans, but when he gets there (16 years later), it turns out that the final member of the original expedition is not dead but has been adopted by the lower species and fomenting revolution amongst them, and they've taken to arms and defeated the dominant species, killing enough of them that they cannot survive for more than a few generations before becoming hopelessly inbred.

Basically, 130 pages of rape memories, 130 pages of anguish about being kidnapped, 130 pages of theological nimmer-nammer, then 10 pages of "oh yeah, those 400 pages of exposition and plot you just finished? Never mind; the people who tortured him are dead and their descendants are doomed." Thank me for saving you several hours of reading.