Review: Lucy Scholes’ The Book of Strange New Things

Michael Faber’s sixth novel puts a Christian missionary in contact with extraterrestrial life – and is a stunning achievement.

Faber’s novel is set on a far planet. Nacho Goytre / Demotix / Corbis

The Book of Strange New Things

Michael Faber

Conongate

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As befits an author who has a flexible relationship with national identity – Netherlands-born, Australia-raised, Scotland-dwelling – Michel Faber's fiction is equally genre unspecific. He's perhaps best-known for his 1870s London-set The Crimson Petal and the White; The Book of Strange New Things is his sixth novel.

The aptly named Peter, a reformed drunk and drug addict and now a Christian preacher, has been chosen from thousands of applicants “to pursue the most important missionary calling since the Apostles had ventured forth to conquer Rome with the power of love”. A large and extremely well-funded American corporation that goes by the elusive acronym USIC has hired him to bring the biblical truths to the natives of Oasis, a far-off planet, the atmosphere of which is suitable for human habitation. It has recently been colonised and they’re now laying the infrastructure for the “thriving community” they plan to establish there.

The only fly in the ointment is that Peter’s wife Bea won’t be accompanying him, having not passed the rigorous vetting process, but they’re both prepared to shoulder the disappointment and put their trust in a greater plan.

Peter’s realistic enough to expect trials and tribulations not dissimilar to those endured by his earthbound predecessors. Instead, however, an “evangelist’s dream” awaits him. The Oasans are hungry for guidance; a gentle, shy flock of lambs, almost childlike in their innocence, for Peter to minister to who quickly rename themselves “Jesus Lover One”, “Jesus Lover Two” and so forth. It all seems too good to be true.

As previously proved with the arrestingly creepy Under the Skin – the release, earlier this year, of Jonathan Glazer's film adaptation of Faber's first novel was a timely reminder of the weird and wonderful worlds that reside in his imagination – Faber is a skilled depicter of strange new things. Attempting to describe the subtle nuances that distinguish the Oasans (since neither the behaviour nor the outward appearance of one is particularly distinctive from another), Peter writes to Bea that it would take "a novelist's skill" to do the members of his new congregation justice, a forte he readily admits he lacks despite his apparent way with words when it comes to spreading the Gospel.

This, though, is precisely where Faber's own talent lies – his ability to render that which is foreign and unfamiliar both distinctly tangible and fathomable. That acknowledged though, it is man/womankind with whom Faber is really concerned, not our extraterrestrial counterparts or their strange new worlds. Just as Under the Skin said more about how we source our food than about the depravity of Faber's fictional aliens, this is a story about one man's very human experiences, despite being set among an unknown race in an galaxy far, far away.

What it truly means to have love, faith and compassion; what it means to be a husband, a father, or a friend; but also the physicality of bodily experience, living within the body’s abilities and its limitations. Peter’s mission makes him acutely aware of his corporeal existence; from the planet’s “warm swimming pool”-like atmosphere that laps and flows around him, “making him intimately aware of his armpit hair, the clefts of his groin, the shape of his toes inside their humid footwear”, to the host of everyday miracles that are involved in keeping him alive.

And within this emphasis on human experience, at the heart of the novel is the story of a marriage. The gulf that opens up between husband and wife – until now each other's beloved companion and helpmeet – becomes so large it threatens both their relationship and their faith. Echoes of Conrad's Heart of Darkness ripple through the text (the base's original pastor, who mysteriously disappeared, was called Kurtzberg), but there's a twist to the tale as life on Oasis is nothing if not civilised, sedate and serene, while the real trouble is back on earth – the missives Bea writes to her husband tell of the collapse of society's governing structures, from rat-­infested garbage remaining uncollected in the streets, banks and supermarkets going bust, to hospital cleaning staff on permanent strikes; "acts of God" too destructive to fully comprehend, cyclones, tidal waves and volcanic eruptions wiping out huge populations in the blink of an eye; and terrorist attacks and random acts of violence.

Who would have thought the story of an intergalactic missionary would be one of the most compelling novels of the year. It’s a stunning achievement, a book that burns brightly in an increasingly fraught world.

Lucy Scholes is a freelance journalist who lives in London.