The Book of Strange New Things, 3
So I don’t think Michel Faber’s The Book of Strange New Things works. Its lead is unbelievable; the prose is unmemorable to a fault; the payoffs meant to explain the eerie human and mental atmosphere on the alien planet are unsatisfactory, and call in turn for further explanations that are never forthcoming.
What works, if anything? A few things.
1. The aliens. Or as Peter calls them, the Oasans. Faber succeeds in creating and depicting—with considerable restraint—a plausible and heretofore unimagined style of intelligent life beyond Earth. We get to know them, but at some distance. They are hungry for Jesus, and believably so. They are stubborn, and stubbornly non-human, yet intelligible. They are both like us (bipedal, five-fingered, linguistic) and unlike us (misshapen, hideous faces; radically communitarian; lacking something like an Ego, though individuated nonetheless). Faber is at his best when he’s describing the Oasan community or narrating a conversation between one of them and Peter.
2. The most theologically pregnant feature of the book is the suggestion that the Oasans are mortal, profoundly vulnerable to suffering, illness, and death, but may not be sinful. This is half a virtue for the novel, because Faber is clever enough to imagine this state of affairs (and, by extension, the effects it might have for pastor-missionaries who think of Sin as the one great problem addressed by Christianity), but not committed or interested enough to follow through on its many pastoral and theological implications. C. S. Lewis did so in the first two books of his Space Trilogy, but that is a work of fantasy as much as it is science fiction. Faber here could have offered a more realistic or at least less of a #FullChristian take. But he just leaves it untouched, beyond the crisis it creates for Peter’s faith, since what the Oasans want is healing of their infirmities, and he doesn’t know if he truly believes he can offer that. Then he decides to leave them. The end.
3. That’s a tad glib. The final two pages, the final paragraph, and the final line are all utterly fitting to the book, and quite apt to the biblical verse on which they are a riff. Speaking of which…
4. The relationship between Peter and Beatrice (hello there, Meaningful Names; may I take your baggage?) that is, or is meant to be, the emotional heart of the novel largely works, I think, though I am undecided on what Faber himself thinks of it. Due to the distance between them, Peter’s poor communication skills, and the roiling catastrophes on Earth, Bea more or less lets go of Peter within two or three months of the six-month mission. Seems abrupt, no? She doesn’t stop loving him, but she in effect hands him over to the Oasans, thinking him dispassionate and uncaring, even as she is carrying their first and only child in her womb. It would not be an unjust reading to say that what the novel reveals is that Peter and Bea’s relationship was fragile from the start, built on codependency (she rescued him from addiction and led him to Christ; marrying him brought her out of shame for her upbringing and past sexual experiences) and persisting mutual neediness (they have no friends to speak of; they have no activities other than evangelizing and caring, together, for their little flock). Each of them has nothing but the other, plus Jesus. When all is right with the world, that’s more than enough. When the world—their world—starts to crumble, it proves not nearly enough. What I want to know is: Does Faber want us to see this? Or does he think their relationship a beautiful, healthy, antifragile thing that is only called into question by the stress shocks, so to speak, of unprecedented distance and trial? In any case, it’s emotionally credible, and while I wasn’t devastated by their increasing detachment and loss, I felt it.
4. Speaking of which, Faber also succeeds in his depiction of Peter’s relationship with Grainger, his main “handler” and only real friend on Oasis. Their budding no-yes-maybe-no relationship—little more than seeking some kind of basic human connection in an emotional wasteland—is worn and lived-in and all too recognizable.
* * *
I cannot conclude these reflections, however, without instancing a few quotations to show how off, finally, Peter is as a character, that is, as a Christian convert, pastor, and missionary (recall: not because his theology is wrong, but because it doesn’t hold together; the parts don’t add up to a whole that makes sense of his character, or that echoes anything one would find in the world of Christian faith and ministry). First:
“So what’s your role?”
“My role?”
“Yeah. A minister is there to connect people to God, right? Or to Christ, Jesus, whatever. Because people commit sins and they need to be forgiven, right? So . . . what sins are these guys committing?”
“None that I can see.”
“So . . . don’t get me wrong, Peter, but . . . what exactly is the deal here?”
Peter wiped his brow again. “Christianity isn’t just about being forgiven. It’s about living a fulfilled and joyous life. The thing is, being a Christian is an enormous buzz; that’s what a lot of people don’t understand. It’s deep satisfaction. It’s waking up in the morning filled with excitement about every minute that’s ahead of you.”
Mmm. Okay. An enormous buzz. Filled with excitement. Did I mention that this guy left behind his wife and all he knew to share the gospel with aliens? That he and his wife, back on Earth, would hand-stitch tracts of Bible stories to be mailed and delivered to foreign, “unreached” people groups? For what? Buzz and excitement? (NB: He’s not a charismatic, and his faith is rocked to the core when an Oasan asks him to pray for her to be healed from a physical injury.)
Second:
He only wished he’d had the chance to explain more fully how prayer worked. That it wasn’t a matter of asking for things and being accepted or rejected, it was a matter of adding one’s energy—insignificant in itself—to the vastly greater energy that was God’s love. In fact, it was an affirmation of being part of God, an aspect of His spirit temporarily housed inside a body. A miracle similar, in principle, to the one that had given human form to Jesus.
Ah. Gotcha. So this dude’s a “we’re all incarnations of God/Jesus is just the highest version” sort of Christian. Excellent. No further comment necessary, none whatsoever.
Third and last:
“You one of those decaffeinated Christians, padre? The diabetic wafer? Doctrine-free, guilt-reduced, low in Last Judgment, 100 percent less Second Coming, no added Armageddon? Might contain small traces of crucified Jew?” Tartaglione’s voice dripped with contempt. “Marty Kurtzburg—now he was a man of faith. Grace before meals, ‘A Mighty Fortress Is Our God,’ none of this Krishna-has-wisdom-too crapola, always wore a jacket and pressed pants and polished shoes. And if you scratched him deep enough, he’d tell you: These are the last days.”
Peter swallowed hard on what tasted like bile. Even if he was dying himself, he didn’t think these were the world’s last days. God wouldn’t let go of the planet he loved so easily. He’d given His only son to save it, after all. “I’m just trying . . . just trying to treat people the way Jesus might have treated them. That’s Christianity for me.”
Faber almost grasps the nettle here. Almost. The problem is that he supposes there are only two options: either fundamentalist (the Lutheran Kurtzburg) or non-fundamentalist (the (Abelardian?) evangelical Peter). Faber’s imagination can conceive a traditionalist Christian believer exclusively as a fundamentalist who travels to an alien world in “jacket and pressed pants and polished shoes.” Equation: true believer = traditionalist = confesses an actual bodily resurrection = fundamentalist = culturally parochial and anthropologically naive stereotypical Western missionary. And since Peter is not that, that is to say the last item, he cannot be any of the others. But Faber also wants—or rather, his narrative requires—Peter to be a Bible-believing, hyper-evangelistic, tract-mailing, low-church Pietist type. One who thinks Christianity is a matter of life and death … and yet who also describes Christianity as an exciting emotional buzz, moralized without remainder into treating other people the way Jesus would treat them.
The novel remains powerful and evocative, and I don’t regret reading it. But the unrealized potential makes the whole thing all the more disappointing. Oh well.
