Michel Faber, The Book of Strange New Things (2014)

Faber is a novelist I esteem a great deal; but this novel left me pulling my 'lost dog pondering a sign-post' face. It's not badly written, or wholly uninteresting; but by the same token I can't honestly say it really works or that I liked it, or that it struck me as ultimately worthwhile. I'd be tempted to peg it as falling down in the ways familiar from previous 'literary' novelists deciding to have a go at genre sf; except Faber's debut Under the Skin was a proper SF novel, and a very good one. So what goes wrong here?

I'll qualify myself straight away and say that some elements here go very right. The core of the novel is a portrait of a happy marriage, Peter Leigh and his wife Bea, put under the strain of enforced separation, and that's very precisely and movingly worked. I also liked very much the way Faber treats the Christian faith of his Peter and Bea: it's central to their senses of self, and it's handled in the novel with great scads of earnest Christian evangeloid and soul-searchy discourse, as they both try to comprehend and do what they take to be God's will. Like the marvellous BBC series Rev., Strange and New Things manages to give a sense of Peter's life as a vicar in England as one defined by external stresses and practicalities without losing sight of the inward, sustaining faith. It's rare to see that in contemporary fiction. (Of course, the fact that strangeness and newness have always struck me as the crucial Christian salients, howsoever obscured by centuries of tradition and the affection people have for tradition, doubtless helped Faber's representation of Christianity strike home for me where that was concerned). One of the novel's best moments, I thought, is when Peter recalls the day he proposed to Beatrice, 10.30 on a morning of sweltering heat, as the two of them were standing at a cash machine in the high street prior to doing a supermarket shop.

Maybe he should have gone down on one knee, because her "Yes, let's" had sounded hesitant and unromantic, as though she considered the proposal nothing more than a pragmatic solution to the inconvenience of high rents. [203]

Everything in the day goes wrong: their bank card is swallowed by the machine; when they go to the branch to get a new one the teller is rude and insulting and Bea storms out in a rage; outside they discover a vandal had scratched a swastika into the paintwork of the car; Bea's phone loses battery; the first garage they visit is shut, the second quotes a huge sum for the work to repair the scratched paintwork; then they discover the car exhaust is shot and will need replacing, none of which can they afford. When they eventually get home Peter realises the lamb chops they had bought had spoiled in the heat. He is about to throw them out in fury, but changes his mind. He finds Bea on the balcony of their flat, gazing at the brick wall opposite.

Her cheeks were wet.
'I'm sorry,' he said.
She fumbled for his hand, and their fingers interlocked.
'I'm crying because I'm happy,' she explained, as the sun allowed itself to be veiled in clouds. 'This is the happiest day of my life.' [204]

It's a moment more-or-less nicked from Flaubert's L'Éducation sentimentale of course, but never mind that. It works very well.

So, alright, but here's the problem: all this stuff is prologue and backstory only. The main focus of The Book of Strange New Things, and the reason why Peter is separated so painfully from Bea, is that he has accepted a job with a commercial corporation called USIC to work as a Christian missionary on a distant planet, Oasis. Most of the novel is set here, a hot, rather barren world with 72-hour-long night, constant rain and a spongy surface that soaks all the water up. How the water thereafter convects back into the sky to fall as rain again is not explained. Indeed, throughout these sections, the SF fan's imagination taps Faber's writing to find it not ringing true. Peter agrees to go despite knowing absolutely next-to-nothing about the distant world (Earth as a whole seems improbably uninterested in this habitable, populated planet with its English-speaking aliens), and even less about the organisation that is taking him on. He doesn't even know what 'USIC' stands for. On the space flight to his destination, and upon arrival, other characters drip-feed him (and us) information, but the notion that he'd be parcelled off on this epochal journey without training or briefing simply boggles the mind. There is some hand-wavy intimation that the hyperspace jump has scrambled his memories, so that he's forgotten stuff he was briefed on, but it's not very convincing. When Peter arrives on the planet he's left to his own devices by the other members of the colony; oddly offhand behaviour by his otherwise cost-conscious new employers, given that the expense of transportation means every coke he drinks costs hundreds of dollars and every email he sends his wife (and with nothing else to do he sends a lot) cost them $5000 a pop.

Eventually Peter makes his way to a village of aboriginals -- humanoid in shape and wearing hooded abayas, the main difference to us being that their faces look like 'two foetuses curled up'. Whatever that looks like. Peter discovers, which fact nobody had bothered to tell him, that there was a previous missionary called Kurtzberg who has subsequently disappeared; and that the otherwise opaquely baffling aliens are desperately enthusiastic to receive more Biblical teaching, readings from what they call the 'Book of Strange New Things'. So Peter sets to; and his learning the world is interspersed with epistles between himself and his wife in which she details an increasingly desperate climate collapse on the home planet, and slowly grows apart from him.

The further I read, the more I began to wonder if the weird conceptual ellipses and apparent clumsinesses were going to be explained by some clever final reveal. But, no. They're not. The rather infuriatingly leisurely telling finally works its way to an end, whereupon the reader pauses to reflect how debilitatingly second hand the whole SF element is. This is Blish's A Case of Conscience, without the focus or imaginative steel; and without Blish's deep engagement with the problematic of the human, rather than alien, incarnation of Christ in the gospels. It's Mary Doria Russell's The Sparrow (a much inferior book to Blish's) with only the blandly nice aliens and not the rapist feline overlords. The result is The Book Of Depressingly Familiar and Old-Fashioned Things.

Nor, despite some lovely passages here and there, is it an especially well put-together novel. Faber's novel starts slowly, and then drifts through hundreds of pages  detailing Oasan agricultural routines and Oasan funerary practises and the Oasan habits of shitting in the streets without breaking stride. It picks up some emotional heft again towards the end, though the actual ending itself, avoiding spoilers, is very anti-climactic. When he wants to represent the Oasans speaking their own language (and the difficulty they have speaking English and pronouncing our 's' and 'd'), Faber goes fontbonkers:

Over on Twitter, Samir H. (@ap0cryphal) tells me this is indeed Arabic, though in garbled form ('a native Arab speaker would be able to tell what's actually in that sentence, reading right-to-left' he tweeted me; adding 'the "s" character is called "meem", phonetically it's an "m" sound; "t" character is called "lam," phonetically it's an "l" sound'). I stop short of accusing Faber, with his bernouse-wearing, crumple-faced, shitting-in-the-street, yearning-to-hear-the-true-Gospel, white-protagonist-can't-tell-them-apart, village-dwelling, Arabic speaking aliens, of trading in racist stereotypes. But I'm standing right on the line, there. Who knows? Maybe he uses Arabic font because it's available on the MS Word font menu, and so was ready-to-hand. I don't know, though. (Near the end of the book, he refers to one of the alien's hoods as a 'hijab', so maybe it's all deliberate).

The real problem, it dawns on you as you read, is that Faber just isn't that interested in his alien Others. His story is about the strain placed upon a loving marriage by distance and other difficulties. That in turn makes the alien worldbuilding, the planetary colonisation plans, the aliens themselves pasteboard, set-dressing. A shame, all in all.

On the upside: nice cover design!