Novel asks hard questions
In Michel Faber’s The Book of Strange New Things, pastor Peter Leigh and his wife Bea are separated by light-years. The ambiguously acronymed USIC spends millions of dollars to send him to the planet Oasis, where a settlement of aliens awaits his Christian teachings. He gets on a spaceship, remains unconscious for nearly a month and arrives in a strange but beautiful new world. But once he gets there, he receives letters from Bea detailing the deterioration of the Earth — criminal activity and natural disasters spiking all over the globe — to the point where she, the one who converted her husband from the everything-addict to the prudent pastor, loses her faith entirely.
The novel is narrated in the third person but follows Peter exclusively as he travels to the aliens’ (called Oasans) settlement, preaches and lives among them, then returns home to find horrendous letters from his wife and little explanation from the not-very-forthcoming USIC staff. His life is completely transformed on Oasis — even the rain is different there, swirling and spiraling in the air — but he comes to realize he and Bea are undergoing entirely different transformations, both outside themselves and within. Peter is coming to understand Christianity in a new light, more faithful than ever, revitalized; Bea is depressed, lonely, losing faith. And while Peter’s world is evolving and growing, Bea’s is falling apart.
In terms of style, Faber’s writing itself draws suspiciously little attention. It is understated, simple, almost spiritually so, in a way that absorbs the reader invisibly — while the writing is beautiful, it is the content that is highlighted. But at the same time, this calm invisibility reflects the content in an insidious way. Peter and Bea are transparent: their intentions are clear and their communication is straightforward; the USIC, on the other hand, hides much of the knowledge it has without drawing attention, much like Faber’s style itself. Even the staff, who are well-informed of the company’s plans and reasoning, seem blissfully ignorant of the agenda and especially the “why” question. Peter asks several employees, “Why is the USIC even up here exploring this planet to begin with?” The answers are generally, and very purposefully vague.
Faber is also a master of blending genres. Obviously, the novel is fiction — but the author meshes science fiction with suspense-thriller with drama and even romance. Even the bare-bones plot is a collision of science/technology and religion.
On that note, the spirituality plays a key role in the novel, yet it never becomes too heavy-handed. For a religious person, it reads as a new religious experience; for a non-religious person, it reads as a fascinating cultural case study of the Oasans themselves. Through either lens, the Oasans are intriguing, mysterious and complex in a way that makes the reader hungry to know more about them, even after the story is finished.
This read is frustrating in several ways, however. First, Faber is a master of suspense (if you need proof beyond The Book of Strange New Things, read his also masterful Under the Skin). But the book is long — about 500 pages. Consequently, it’s a page-turner, but a frustrating one: the information you ache to know and the questions formulating as you read often go unanswered for chapters at a time, if they ever get answered at all. Second, Peter as a character isn’t exactly the most in-touch with the female mind, and his situation doesn’t help. Idealistic man with little knowledge of woman’s emotions goes as far as humanly possible from the one woman he cares about? It’s enough to make a reader worry about that woman’s mental health. A reader might find herself practically shouting at the book (sorry, suitemates) in the hope that Peter would figure his life out. These two frustrations, of course, are how you know you’re reading a good book; and they’re precisely why this book is sure to be a favorite.
The Book of Strange New Things is a complex and beautiful exploration of technology, science, spirituality and the human soul. It contains no definitive answers, but it has so many facets that it can appeal to every person who commits to reading it. The examination of spirituality and complex emotional relationships (between Peter and Bea, but also between Peter and the Oasans) did the trick. For someone else, the draw of this novel could be the intrigue of translating Christianity to a people who, arguably, Jesus did not save; the intricate yet ambiguous detail of Oasan life; or the ever-present mystery of the USIC. This book has a thousand angles, each as interesting as the last but in very different ways. Ultimately, Faber’s new and possibly last novel is hefty in both size and content but worth every page.