Book of Strange New Things

Michel Faber’s 2014 novel, The Book of Strange New Things, may be the first of a new subgenre: The intergalactic epistolary novel. Syfy meets Pamela.

Pastor Peter Leigh has been chosen by the mysterious USIC corporation for a unique mission – to serve as spiritual leader to the residents on a planet known as Oasis. His beloved wife Beatrice is not chosen, and so Peter travels trillions of miles alone. He is not the first missionary to the “Oasans,” and he discovers on arrival that many of them already identify as “Jesus Lovers” who want nothing more than for Peter to teach them from The Book of Strange New Things, a.k.a. the Bible. Peter’s challenge is not to win them over to Jesus, but to maintain his connection with humanity, especially Bea back on earth, when every fiber of his being is inclined to go native. Most of the intense drama takes place over a long-distance email system known as the Shoot.

Faber’s use of science fiction techniques is uneven. Oasis is an eerie place, with watery air that drenches everyone who steps outside and titanic swirling rainstorms. The Oasans are wonderfully done: Not at all cute, ugly in fact, but gentle, generous, undemonstrative. On the other hand, it’s not at all clear when this is supposed to be taking place. Back on earth, everyone is still using cell phones and driving cars and flying on commercial airplanes; the climate and political situation on Earth deteriorates during Peter’s mission, but it deteriorates along recognizably early 21st-century pathways. Yet USIC has been on Oasis long enough to build a large facility manned by a sizable crew. 

The plot of the book is unbalanced as well. Peter is astonishingly uncurious about the situation he’s stepped into. He knows nothing about USIC’s intentions on Oasis, and makes only half-hearted attempts to discover what happened to the earlier pastor and others who have disappeared from the compound. Peter’s lack of curiosity fits the story for reasons I won’t reveal, but it frustrates the reader and makes for a lop-sided book. The novel is nearly 500 pages long, and as I approached page 400 I realized that he was not going to have enough time to answer even a handful of the questions – unless someone intervened with a lengthy explanatory monologue. I hoped it wouldn’t happen. It did.

Faber grew up in a conservative Christian home and has been through his militant atheist phase. But this isn’t a militantly atheistic book in the least. There are some missteps; Peter is too stereotypically evangelical, like The Simpsons‘s Flanders. But Faber is not sneering or vengeful. Peter is smart (though not as smart as he supposes), sincere, a genuine lover of the Lovers of Jesus.

Faber’s second wife died while he was writing this novel, which he says will be his last. His love for his wife reverberates in the relationship between Peter and Bea that the book shines. Bea’s has a powerful feminine voice; her frustrations and fears are palpable, though often lost on her pious husband who quotes the Bible when all she wants is a hug. Peter’s wife is his Beatrice, and when she loses her way he finds himself in a dark wood indeed. If the Syfy fails, the tender, tortured epistles succeed beautifully.