The Book of Strange New Things, 1
I just finished Michel Faber’s The Book of Strange New Things, and I’ve got Thoughts. I didn’t hate it, but I didn’t love it either. I think I might expand on a couple reasons in future posts. But the first thing I have to say about the book is this.
The lead character is simply not believable.
Here are things that are true of him:
He is a Christian.
He is a British evangelical.
He is an adult convert.
He is an ex-addict, sober alcoholic, and onetime homeless person.
He is happily married.
He is a pastor.
He and his wife are partners in ministry.
Their ministry is extremely evangelistic; the sort that moves heaven and earth to reach a single soul.
Their church is very “low.”
Their church and ministry are Bible- and sermon-centric (liturgy and sacrament are, if I recall correctly, never mentioned).
Their evangelistic efforts include, for example, hand-crafted tracts and pamphlets for far-away “unreached” people groups.
They both agree, upon discovery of intelligent life on a distant planet, that it is God’s will for him, the husband-pastor, to journey light-years away to bring the gospel to this alien species.
Also, they both share misgivings about, bordering on dislike for, St. Paul.
Also, he, the husband-pastor, takes for granted that the Pastoral Epistles were written by St. Paul to St. Timothy in the year AD 68.
Also, he rejects with vehemence the doctrine of the resurrection of the body.
The story is set in the near future; though the year is never specified, it is probably meant to be sometime in the next 50-150 years.
Numbers 1 through 12 are perfectly believable. Number 14 would be consonant with them. Number 13 would be an odd fit; the reader would be right to expect more than a passing explanation (which she would not receive). But number 15 brings the whole edifice crumbling down.
Let me instance very nearly the only reference to bodily resurrection in all 500 pages of the novel:
Jesus Lover Five [an alien believer] had fallen silent. Peter couldn’t tell if she was persuaded, reassured, sulking or what. What had she meant, anyway? Was Kurtzberg [the alien congregation’s former missionary-pastor from Earth] one of those Lutheran-flavored fundamentalists who believed that dead Christians would one day be resurrected into their old bodies—magically freshened up and incorruptible, with no capacity to feel pain, hunger or pleasure—and go on to use those bodies for the rest of eternity? Peter had no time for that doctrine himself. Death was decay, decay was decay, only the spirit endured.
The author, Faber, is unfailingly unpatronizing in his own (alien) inhabitation of an evangelical missionary’s mind and thoughts, even his piety. But this false note is telling. Like a fart in a fugue, it afflicts the whole. And the fact that it comes halfway through the novel, with neither preparation nor elaboration, tells us that the author cannot hear the dissonance, does not smell the stench.
Bible-centric low-church hyper-evangelistic born-again missionary-pastors are, without exception, Pauline in flavor and faith, and above all they are adamant believers in the resurrection of the body: first Jesus’s, then believers’. There are no exceptions to this rule. They do not pick and choose books of the New Testament with which they disagree or in which they casually disbelieve. To begin to do such a thing, to begin to make exceptions, is to cease to be a Bible-centric low-church hyper-evangelistic born-again missionary-pastor, one willing to move heaven and earth to win a single soul, to place a New Testament in the hands of a single unbeliever.
Perhaps I exaggerate. Perhaps Faber is himself such a person (though, from what I can tell, he most certainly is not), or perhaps he knows such a person. But such a person in unique on this planet. To make such a unique person the protagonist of a novel, one must know, and show that one knows, that he is indeed so unique; and, thereupon, to sketch what led to his being thus unique. That Faber does not offer that sketch suggests to me, his reader, that he lacks this knowledge. Lacking it, the novel’s central character does not hold together. Which means the novel does not hold together.
