Review by New York Times Review
I'M NOT THE first person to observe that the Apollo missions showed us, above all, the extraordinary beauty of our own planet. Maybe it's a bias of our species, and maybe space tourism will one day make the view seem commonplace, but the aura of our singularly blue marble, seen turning in the cosmos, has yet to diminish. A comparable journey takes place in the best works of science fiction - an imaginative visit to speculative realms that returns the reader more forcibly to the sad and beautiful facts of human existence. At the outset of Michel Faber's latest novel, "The Book of Strange New Things," its protagonist, Peter Leigh, is about to venture into space. Peter is a pastor who has been selected to travel to a newly colonized planet at the request of its native population. His official job title is "minister (Christian) to indigenous population." His vocation will set new records for both missionary work and long-distance relationships: Peter is going to be separated by light-years from his wife, Beatrice. Leaving Bea; their cat, Joshua; and a 21st-century planet Earth where the current sense of climatic and geopolitical chaos has been magnified by a couple of sadly too-plausible degrees, Peter heads off to take up his new ministry. In his previous novels, Faber chose to work in the kinds of disreputable genres that tend to elicit indifference, at best, from reviewers and prize committees. Starting from genre premises, Faber then enriches his material with a care for writing and an attentiveness to character that stake his work's claim to be considered literature, whatever the word means. His second and most commercially successful novel, "The Crimson Petal and the White," took the blowsiness and sprawl of Victorian melodrama and recast it according to a darker and more modern sensibility. In his remarkable debut, "Under the Skin" (whose story I can't bring myself to spoil for people who haven't yet experienced it), a science fiction conceit is raised into a profound examination of the nature of empathy that has haunted this reader for a decade. Similarly, the ingredients of "The Book of Strange New Things" don't exactly break new ground. They include a planet, named Oasis by the mysteriously acronymed corporation (USIC) that runs it; a complacent and incurious human work force at a base on the nascent colony; a predecessor who has gone missing in unexplained circumstances; and an inscrutable alien people. But readers of "Under the Skin" will recognize the method: taking a standard science fiction premise and unfolding it with the patience and focus of a tai chi master, until it reveals unexpected connections, ironies and emotions. "The Book of Strange New Things" squeezes its genre ingredients to yield a meditation on suffering, love and the origins of religious faith. As Faber reminds us, the phrase in the Old Testament that is variously rendered as "of old" or "long ago" in different versions means, in Hebrew, something closer to "from afar." It is as though the moral precepts that govern much of the world's behavior are derived from far-off and alien civilizations. Once arrived on Oasis, Peter uncovers his new world and his new mission an inch and an insect at a time. And Faber is exactly the writer you want as your guide to an unfamiliar planet. He is a master of the weird, able to paint dozens of shades of odd, from the incidental strangeness of a hitchhiker with a misspelled sign, to the flora and fauna of Oasis; from the disorienting effects of interstellar travel, to the intergalactic irony of the missionary showing a picture of his pet cat to an uncomprehending member of his new indigenous congregation. Oasis and its inhabitants are rendered gradually visible through both the mundane and the extraordinary. The hermetic human base resembles an airport terminal at night-time, with Muzak playing in the commissary, and hearty crew members hinting that a Christian missionary is a pointless extravagance. But beyond its walls lies the purpose of Peter's journey: Oasis itself, with its three-day nights, beautiful spiral rainstorms and otherworldly denizens. "Here was a face that was nothing like a face," Faber writes, describing Peter's first encounter with a native. "Instead, it was a massive whitish-pink walnut kernel. Or no: Even more, it resembled a placenta with two fetuses - maybe 3-month-old twins, hairless and blind - nestled head to head, knee to knee. Their swollen heads constituted the Oasan's clefted forehead, so to speak; their puny ribbed backs formed his cheeks, their spindly arms and webbed feet merged in a tangle of translucent flesh that might contain - in some form unrecognizable to him - a mouth, nose, eyes." Peter's mission, which he takes to with great enthusiasm, is to satisfy the Oasans' mysterious hunger for religious instruction. Not the least of the obstacles is the Oasan language, which thanks to their strange physiognomy "sounded like a field of brittle reeds and rain-sodden lettuces being cleared by a machete." On the page, this is rendered by an unfamiliar orthography that transmits an alien shock to the reader. (This may not flatter speakers of Thai, which seems to be the basis of the Oasan alphabet.) Their bizarre appearance aside, the calm, agrarian life of the Oasans so closely resembles a Christian ideal that it risks making Peter's preaching redundant. But as the novel goes on, it becomes clear that the Oasan condition is in its way as unenviable as the human one. An unimaginable distance from his own planet, Peter first dutifully records his impressions in messages sent at great financial cost through the cosmos to his wife. Then, gradually, he finds himself separated from her concerns and from the series of calamities that are testing her religious faith. One of the great tricks the novel pulls off is to show Peter's progressive alienation from his own species. As with "Under the Skin," the reader is drawn through the book effortlessly, by the combination of incidental strangeness and the suspenseful handling of plot. What, we wonder, is the true purpose of the human colony? What do the Oasans really want? What happened to their first pastor? What does the future hold for Peter and Bea, the universe's first interstellar married couple? Readers of Faber's previous work will rightly anticipate unexpected and often tender resolutions to these questions. Since the critical and commercial triumph of Hilary Mantel, the historical novel is newly respectable. One hopes that Michel Faber can do something similar for speculative writing. Defiantly unclassifiable, "The Book of Strange New Things" is, among other things, a rebuke to the credo of literary seriousness for which there is no higher art than a Norwegian man taking pains to describe his breakfast cereal. As well as the literature of authenticity, Faber reminds us, there is a literature of enchantment, which invites the reader to participate in the not-real in order to wake from a dream of reality to the ineffability, strangeness and brevity of life on Earth. The hero's mission is to satisfy the aliens' mysterious hunger for religious instruction. MARCEL THEROUX'S latest novel, "Strange Bodies," was published in February.
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [November 2, 2014]
Review by Booklist Review
Peter Leigh has been hired by the mysterious USIC corporation to travel to a newly colonized planet, Oasis, light years away. His job will be to minister to the indigenous population and establish a rapport. He leaves his beloved wife, Bea, behind, their only link a kind of interstellar e-mail. He finds the Oasins eagerly awaiting his arrival and singing Amazing Grace. (A previous missionary had disappeared.) The Oasins beg for readings from the Bible, or, as they call it, the book of strange new things. Peter becomes more and more immersed in his mission and building his church, to the detriment of his health and his connection with Bea. Meanwhile, word from home becomes more and more worrisome. Tidal waves, earthquakes, toppling economies, and violence wreak havoc with lives and faith. And finally, the true reason for the Oasis colony comes into question, and Peter must make a decision to stay or go. Like Maria Doria Russell's The Sparrow, this is a marvelously creative and intricate novel, thought-provoking and arresting.--Dickie, Elizabeth Copyright 2014 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Faber's (The Crimson Petal and the White) novel could at first be mistaken for another period piece, as a Christian missionary named Peter bids farewell to his devoted wife, Beatrice, and departs on a mission in foreign lands. Only gradually does the reader discover that the book is set in the far future, where half of what survives is owned by a shadowy company called USIC and that it is not the inhabitants of a mere continent whose souls Peter aims to save, but those of a whole new planet, known as Oasis. He finds willing converts in the alien Oasans-they are eager to learn each new lesson from the Bible, which they call The Book of Strange New Things-but his relations with his fellow human colonists are far rockier. What's worse, Beatrice writes to Peter with grim reports of life back on Earth, where a series of calamities seems to signal the coming apocalypse; more devastating is her confession that she is pregnant with their child in an environment suddenly less hospitable to life than Oasis. Peter will come to question both the finer points of Scripture and his faith as he chooses between the old world and the new. Faber's story isn't eventful enough to support its length, and Beatice and Peter's correspondence grows tiresome. But the book wears its strong premise and mixture of Biblical and SF tropes extremely well. (Oct.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
Peter leaves his wife, Bea, back on Earth to serve as minister to an agrarian alien race in another galaxy. Transported by the private corporation USIC, he quickly learns that nothing is what it seems. Society on Earth is starting to fall apart, and Bea is struggling to survive alone while Peter is hard at work ministering to his alien parishioners, who refer to the Bible as "The Book of Strange New Things." Faber's (The Crimson Petal and the White) latest book explores themes of humanity, relationship, separation, and faith, and many questions are left unanswered as the author cultivates a sense of mystery and otherness. Josh Cohen's narration of the gentle main character and his wife are soft, while his performance of other characters is clear and sharp. VERDICT Fans of Faber's other works will enjoy this, as will those who enjoy character-driven sf and open-ended storytelling. ["Recommended for lovers of thought-provoking sf," read the review of the Hogarth: Crown hc, LJ 9/1/14.]- Cliff Landis, Georgia State Univ. Lib., Atlanta © Copyright 2015. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
A long-awaitedand brilliant and disquietingnovel of faith and redemption by Scotland-based writer Faber (The Crimson Petal and the White, 2002, etc.). Eschatological religion and apocalypse make a natural fit. Throw in a distant planet that's not populated by L. Ron Hubbard acolytes, and you have an intriguing scenario prima facie. Peter (think about the name) is a minister who, aspiring to be useful, signs up for a stint, courtesy of one of the world's ruling corporations, on far-off Oasis, a forbidding chunk of rock on which the crew of the Nostromo, of Alien fame, wouldn't be out of place. "This was not Gethsemane: he wasn't headed for Golgotha, he was embarking on a great adventure." So he thinks, allowing for his habit of casting events in religiously hallucinogenic terms. The natives are shyand who wouldn't be, given the rough humans who have come there before Peterbut receptive to his message, which deepens as Peter becomes more and more involved with his mission. Trouble is, things aren't good back on Earth: His wife, with child, is staring what appear to be the end times in the face, even as life on Oasis, as one human denizen snarls, turns out to be "sorta like the Rapture by committee." Is Peter good enough to make it through the second coming? He's lived, as we learn, a fully charged sinner's life before becoming saintly, and he's just one crisis of faith away from meriting incineration along with the rest of the unholy; good thing the alien-tongued aliens of Oasis will put in a good word for him, even though their tongue may not be entirely comprehensible. Faber's novel runs a touch long but is entirely true to itself and wonderfully original. It makes a fine update to Walter M. Miller Jr.'s Canticle for Leibowitz, with some Marilynne Robinson-like homespun theology thrown in for good measure. What would Jesus do if he wore a space helmet? A profoundly religious exploration of inner turmoil, and one sure to irk the Pat Robertson crowd in its insistence on the primacy of humanity. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
