The Book of Strange New Things, 2
In my last post I wrote about how Peter, the protagonist of Michel Faber’s The Book of Strange New Things, is unbelievable. I want now to say a bit more about why the novel doesn’t quite work.
One is the prose. It is bloodless and boring. Perfectly adequate, never “bad,” it is so unmemorable that at times I wondered if that was Faber’s intention: perhaps to signal the inner purity of Peter’s converted heart and mind. Based on a quick perusal of Faber’s other work (esp. Under the Skin and The Crimson Petal and the White), the man can write interesting and stylish prose. So what went wrong here? Or, if the plain style is a choice, why does it fail in its purpose? The only possible narrative effect is to make of Peter an utterly vanilla protagonist.
A second issue is the tone. For much of the novel the atmosphere on Oasis, the alien planet, is somehow askew: haunting, haunted, moody, oppressive, mysterious. The reader gets major Solaris vibes (or even, for me, echoes of Sphere). Something is wrong here. What could it be?
Nothing at all, as it turns out. The “reveals,” such as they are, are fourfold:
Light years away, Earth—politically and ecologically—is falling apart at the seams.
The corporation that sponsors both the intergalactic travel to Oasis and the scientific outpost on it has as its goal to make Oasis a kind of ark or haven for the elite few on Earth who are (a) rich enough and (b) sane enough to qualify to come.
The corporate employees (scientists, engineers, doctors, mechanics) who work at/for the Oasan outpost are such flat personalities—resorting to neither sex nor drugs nor violence to let off steam or give vent to their vices and repressed desires—by design: they were selected by a sophisticated psychological process created to exclude all persons who might fall back on such “anti-social” habits.
The intelligent alien species, the Oasans, have extremely vulnerable bodies supported by nonexistent immune systems. The slightest injury or illness is terminal, therefore, and they believe “the technique of Jesus” to provide deliverance from, and possibly miraculous healing for, this condition.
I’m going to save comment on number 4 for the next post, because (along with the depiction of Peter’s epistolary estrangement with his wife, Beatrice) it the depiction of the Oasans is the best thing about the book. What I want to focus on now is simple: none of these reveals is satisfying, because none of them explains the brooding, discombobulated atmosphere so effectively manufactured by Faber. The closest any of them comes is number 3, and this one is the least credible. Why?
Answer: Faber wants us to believe that, so long as you put the right controls in place, you could transplant 50-100 adult human beings from Earth to a colony on another planet, and without actually lobotomizing, sterilizing, or otherwise chemically sedating them, they would go about their daily jobs more or less contentedly and consistently, without psychic or emotional needs or problems, absent children, elders, religion, recreation, marriage, family, sex, alcohol, drugs, gambling, art, literature, theft, envy, deceit, or violence.
To me, that reads like a joke. Or a thought experiment by someone who’s never met a human being, or read human history. Or, at best, a “what if?” exercise or narrative puzzle that calls for further explanation—rather than itself an attempt at an explanation of some other mysterious phenomenon, which is how it functions in the novel. How can this fanciful assertion of neutered, compliant, prelapsarian humans (who are, mind you, nothing but a random assortment of corporate employees who live on an alien planet with nothing to do but work) serve to answer the reader’s befuddlement at the unyielding, inhuman, overbearing environment in which Peter finds himself? The answer to one inexplicable mystery cannot be the assertion merely of another inexplicable mystery, not least one so implausible as this. But there it is. And it does not work.
