The last book of Michel Faber’s that I read was his Victorian-era novel that people either enjoyed or wanted to kill with fire. I fell into the “enjoyed” category, so I was surprised and delighted to discover that late last year Faber released an actual science-fiction novel. Although since we’re talking about a Michel Faber novel here, the science-fiction genre is just the jumping off point to something a lot more complicated.
You wouldn’t think that a multinational company would spend a lot of money to send a priest to another planet, but that’s exactly what USCI did when they hired Peter Leigh to be a missionary to the natives of Oasis, a planet several galaxies away from Earth.
Expecting to run into all kinds of problems while trying to spread the Word of God to another species, Peter instead finds friendly natives who have demanded a Christian priest, who have all re-named themselves as “Jesus Lovers” (Jesus Lover One, Jesus Lover Five, Jesus Lover Seventy-two), and who’s only desire is to have Peter teach them all about the Bible, or as they refer to it, “The Book of Strange New Things”. No missionary has ever had an easier time evangelizing to a new race, much less a whole new species, and Peter would be a lot more comfortable if he could stop wondering about USCI’s motivations, or about his oddly placid coworkers, or why no one seems to know what happened to the Oasan’s previous priest.
Meanwhile, the letters from Peter’s wife grow more and more desperate as the Earth is suddenly hit with floods, erupting volcanoes, massive storms, and what looks like the collapse of civilization as the human race slowly loses its mind. And Peter is helpless to do anything about it other than to offer Christian words of wisdom as Bea’s life turns into a literal hell.
The Book of Strange New Things is about as different as you can get from his previous book, The Crimson Petal and the White. And unfortunately I think it’s going to tick people off for the exact same reasons.
“In the event of a collision, low-level lighting will guide you to an exit, where you will be sucked instantly to your death. Please remember that the nearest usable planet may be three billion miles behind you.”
When it comes to Oasis, you can forget about stunning vistas of canyons and alien forests and dinosaur-like creatures picking off helpless colonists. Oasis on first look is dull. It’s flat, kind of a muddy brown, and the dominant plant life is a mushroom called whiteflower, which is the source of most of the food on the planet too. The climate is boringly tropical; the air is so filled with moisture that anyone standing outside is dripping wet after just a few moments.
And yet? Very gradually you find out that the planet is beautiful too. There’s something strange about the atmosphere; air currents are constantly moving, feeing like the air is twining around your body, ruffling your hair, and creeping into your clothes. Sleeping exposed to the air feels like lying in water. The Oasan day lasts three Earth-days, leading to long, changeless hours in bright sunshine. Any rain happens in fits and starts; a rain shower in the distance looks like a misty ferris wheel. Oasan water is clear green, and it tastes like honeydew.
The natives on Oasis have a surprising amount of beauty as well, although it takes a little while to see it. Oasans are very alien, almost repulsively so, with nothing even resembling a face. After living with them for several days Peter still can’t tell them apart except by the color of their robes. They have trouble with ‘t’ and ‘s’ sounds, so those are substituted with symbols, making their speech a little hard to read. And they don’t understand metaphors at all, leading to some humorous scenes such as when Peter says somewhat urgently that he needs to “pass water”. And yet for all that they’re obviously alien, they keep doing things that are amazingly human, or even better than human. They take wonderful care of their treasured priest, and they’re incapable of being offended. They have concepts for past and future, but they seem to live entirely in the present so they don’t dwell on bitterness or regret. There are very subtle moments of understanding and kindness, and they have endless enthusiasm for Christianity, building a church and making paintings based on scripture to decorate it.
We see all of this through Peter’s eyes, and I have to start out by saying that when Michel Faber wrote Peter Leigh he created what feels like an archetype for the Perfect Christian. I don’t mean a saint, I mean someone I would like to meet in real life. I kept waiting for him to be condescending, or xenophobic, or just one of those well-meaning but clueless folks who think they can win every argument if they just keep throwing scripture at it without actually listening to the person they’re talking to. And you know what? It never happens. Peter tries to actually reach people, to find out why they’re hurting and what they need him to say rather than what he thinks they need to hear. He gives an amazing eulogy for a fellow USCI employee, telling the life story of a man he’d only met briefly, and somehow managing to connect with his decidedly non-religious coworkers. And he never once assumes that people (human or otherwise) are worth even slightly less if they’re not Christian. He even politely dismisses the suggestion that the nameless Oasan settlement be called “New Jerusalem”: “That would be disrespectful to the ones who aren’t Christians,” he said. “And anyway, they have a lot of trouble pronouncing ‘s’ sounds.”
But again, Peter isn’t some kind of saint looking down on his congregation from on high. He has a past as a drug addict and alcoholic that helps him understand people when they’re at their lowest. If he reacts to something negatively, with disgust or annoyance, he also tries each and every second to recognize when he’s doing that and switch it around to compassion, or at the very least a lot of patience. He’s very frank and open about his adoration and sexual desire for his wife, Bea, a woman who pulled him out of his life as an addict, and who has been his equal partner and soulmate for years.
Unfortunately it’s Bea’s letters to Peter that are the start of his troubles. Everything on Earth is literally falling apart, and Bea is having to handle it on her own. She’s trying to keep up her spirits, but it’s hard to cope when the person who understands you the most is millions of miles away. Peter starts pulling away without meaning to by failing to respond to all of her letters, or to respond to some of the important things that Bea is telling him. He’s finding that he doesn’t have a talent for conveying the amazing things he’s seeing, which means that for the first time in years he’s experiencing something that she can’t share. And he simply can’t prioritize in his head the billions of people suffering on Earth when he’s trying to do what he can for the Oasans who need him right here and right now.
The letters from Bea jump from catastrophe to catastrophe. The worse things get on Earth, the worse they get between Peter and Bea. These were some of the chapters that made me want to shake Peter a little. He can’t say anything right, even when he’s trying to. His reply to a distraught letter from her has an offhand mention that her typos make it look like she’s been drinking. Big mistake. He tries to theorize that the years of alcoholism and drug abuse have damaged something in the part of his brain that would let him care deeply about things that aren’t right in front of him. That works about as well as you would expect. At one point he even gently asks her to not use the phrase “Godforsaken”. *sigh* Peter, do wake up.
Then Bea experiences a disaster, a stupid accident followed by stupid human cruelty followed by a stupid misunderstanding. It’s the final straw to make her give up her faith in God.
And let me tell you, it’s very, very hard to blame her.
Bea’s options are now a cruel God, a God who picks and chooses who’s prayers to answer at random, or a God who simply doesn’t exist at all. There’s nothing that Peter can say to her about a loving God, when he himself can’t even explain why God can help some people, but not others. His crisis in his faith and in his relationship happens right around the time that he starts to learn the real reason for him being on the planet in the first place.
“You cannot create a thriving community, let alone a new civilization, by putting together a bunch of people who are no fucking trouble!”
Just like The Crimson Petal and the White, you’re not going to find out everything by the end. At least one theory is revealed about what USCI is doing on the planet in the first place, and what criteria they used to select the people to work there, and why their methods have made the USCI compound such a bland nightmare to live in. You also find out why the Oasans demanded a priest, and why they’ve given themselves so wholeheartedly to Christianity. It’s a concept that appears dozens of times in the Bible, and it explains so much about everything that Peter found unexplainable about the Oasans. It’s either a sign of boundless faith, or a heart-breaking misunderstanding. The whole thing destroyed the previous priest, and it might have destroyed Peter’s faith as well. But you don’t find out for sure because the book cuts off when it feels like there were still several chapters left of story to tell.
So did I enjoy this it? Tough question. This book was exhausting to read, and for some time after I’d read the last page I kept thinking “I need to finish that book so I can find out what happened,” right before remembering that I’ll never find out what happened. There are many many difficult questions about faith that are never answered, for the simple fact that they unanswerable. A lot of the book made me extremely uncomfortable, which I think is exactly what Faber was going for.
But the story kept pulling me along for all five hundred pages. Faber created so many beautiful images, like interlocked rainstorms dancing across the plains, and a lovely handmade cross in the middle of nowhere.There were characters that all felt intensely alive, human and alien, and one scene near the end that made me cry, with a small Oasan in a big hospital bed, and a priest who tries so hard to be human.