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Book Review

‘The Book of Strange New Things’ by Michel Faber

Michel Faber’s new novel is set on an intergalactic stage.EVA YOUREN

Michel Faber is best known for “The Crimson Petal and The White,’’ his deservedly best-selling tale of a Victorian prostitute and her parfumier lover. But “The Book of Strange New Things’’ returns to the vaguely didactic, science fiction-esque milieu of his first novel, albeit reversing its premise.

In “Under the Skin,’’ an alien visits Earth to harvest humans for food, is entranced by its beauty, and comes to question the foundations of her society. In “The Book of Strange New Things,’’ a human visits a faraway planet to harvest souls for God, is entranced by its alien life, and comes to question a lot of things, though the point is never quite clear.

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“The Book of Strange New Things’’ takes place in a recognizable near future, where corporate behemoth and intergalactic colonizer USIC has bought Cape Canaveral, but still stocks the lounge of its base on the planet Oasis (“It’s not a colony . . . It’s a community”) with recent copies of Vogue, Men’s Health, and House & Garden. USIC has hired young British evangelist Peter, for whom “[d]oing God’s work is a privilege and a joy,” as the base’s “Minister (Christian) to Indigenous Population.”

Peter is married to Beatrice, the sensible, practical balance to his seemingly naive optimism, whom he must leave behind as he embarks on his mission. As the story unfolds, it becomes clear that if Peter is Christ’s right hand, Bea is the one who got him there, redeeming him from the hell of destitute addiction, like her namesake led Dante from Purgatory to Paradise. And if that isn’t enough symbolic nomenclature, “Heart of Darkness’’ looms, in the figure of Kurtzberg, the previous pastor who has abandoned his fellow colonizers and gone AWOL.

Peter expects a challenge, but when he finally arrives at the native community C-2, known to the base residents as Freaktown, he discovers a flock of gentle Christians awaiting his arrival with The Book of Strange New Things, as they call the Bible, already introduced to them by Kurtzberg. Delighted by his eager congregation and repelled by the apathetic professionalism of the base, Peter embraces the Oasan Jesus Lovers.

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Peter quickly goes native, eating the Oasans’ food, attempting to learn their language, adopting their habits (including random defecation and drinking the melon-flavored rain), joining them in their work (harvesting whiteflower, the indigenous foodstuff, which the Oasans trade to USIC for drugs — of the antibiotic and analgesic variety), and rewriting the Bible so Oasans can more easily read it .

Meanwhile, back on Earth, things are falling apart. Beginning with a typhoon that destroys the Maldives, Bea reports a litany of increasing chaos — earthquakes, riots, food shortages, and business collapses, all spookily portentous in our current moment of decapitations and Ebola — and despair. Peter and Bea communicate on the Shoot, a transgalactic e-mail conduit, whose name evokes the idiomatic “shoot me a line” (as their correspondence waxes and wanes) and the ominous “shooting the messenger” (as their mutual frustration grows).

But if this strange, new setup seems promising, it doesn’t deliver much. Faber devotes many pages to what is largely a dual ethnography of Oasis, tracking the environments and habits of the base and the Oasans, and many more pages to Peter and Bea’s lengthy and increasingly nagging e-mails, as she begs him to contact her, and he begs her to hold onto her faith. Big issues are put into play — faith, love, redemption, prejudice — but they dwindle away into ambiguous banalities. USIC’s efforts to save humanity through technology, meritocracy, and planetary imperialism are vaguely problematic; Oasan life is vaguely lacking, despite its appeal; faith could be just a powerful placebo but maybe not; and passionate pain might be better than passive acceptance, except that those who feel it are miserable.

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All that’s clear is that we are going to hell in a handbasket, and there’s not much we can do about it — but we knew that. Novels don’t need to ask big questions or provide big answers, but this one suggests it will — and doesn’t.


Rebecca Steinitz can be reached at rsteinitz@gmail.com.