Come back soon Peter, oh very soon, sooner than you can. Read for us the Book of Strange New Things. He could still hear the Oasan's voice, wheezy and strained as though each word was well-nigh impossible to produce, a bleat from a musical instrument made of preposterously ill-suited materials. A trombone carved out of a watermelon, held together with rubber bands.Like with most books, I came to The Book of Strange New Things knowing nothing about it, and as discovering what the basic plot was about was the most charming part of my reading experience, I'll try to begin with a spoiler-free analogy here. You know how on old Twilight Zone episodes they would open with a normal enough scene, and then bit by bit, add odd details until at the end someone is yelling at the naive people boarding the spaceship,“We finally translated it and To Serve Man is a cookbook!”, and then that throws an ironic twist on everything that happened before? The Book of Strange New Things begins like a Twilight Zone episode: opening normally enough and then adding odd details – small mysteries, people behaving strangely, a main character who is having trouble processing the changes he's witnessing – and as a reader, I was making guesses about what the ironic twist would be, waiting for the Soylent Green is people moment...and it never came. Odd details were simply odd, small mysteries were unresolved, and the main character's primary struggle was against himself. It's like the Twilight Zone episode ended with the people boarding the spaceship and the guy on the ground waving and saying, “Have a great time, I don't know what I was worried about!” And wouldn't that be pointless? From here will be more specific and spoilerific...
In the beginning, we meet Peter Leigh and his wife Bea and they're talking about an upcoming separation and I'm thinking, “Oh, a divorce?” And then they get to Heathrow and Peter buys a one-way plane ticket because his work will be open-ended, and I'm thinking, “Oh, a job relocation?” And they start talking about his pastoral duties and what he imagines they'll be like, and I'm thinking, “A Christian missionary? That's almost weird in today's secular world.” And then Peter's picked up in Florida by a chauffeur who uses the word “astronaut” and I was totally intrigued: this is about a Christian missionary travelling to a different planet? Now that's an interesting twist. Peter, who is a sincere and faithful pastor, has no idea how he'll get through to the aliens, but when he first goes to their settlement, he learns that he's actually the second missionary to have made contact with the Oasans and they are desperate for more Bible study; for more information about the Jesus Technique from The Book of Strange New Things. Like I said, I was charmed by this setup, but as answering the question of why the Oasans were so eager for Christianity was the eventual climax – and as that answer wasn't mind-blowing – I was ultimately let down; this book felt pointless.
First on my list of complaints is how nondescript the new world is. The compound where the USIC employees live is a warren of white hallways, with cheap hotel-room type apartments; as impersonal as an airport. The landscape is dark and featureless – absolutely without hills or dips or forests or water. The only hints that we're not on Earth are the long day/night cycles, the palpable atmosphere, the yellow sky, and the regular, swirling rainstorms. There is only one plant on the whole planet (whiteflower, which can be made into anything) and when a swarm of duck/dog hybrids comes through the compound, that's the first native animal even the longtimers have ever seen. There are some bugs. For a book set on a different planet, not much went into the world-building.
As for the inhabitants, they have already been taught enough English for communication (removing any opportunities for misunderstandings), they have a body shape like ours, and their only point of difference is a cleft, meaty head (Peter describes it as two fused fetuses) that has some difficulty pronouncing T's, C's and S's. As their language is so simple, they don't have the vocabulary to engage in philosophical or metaphysical conversations, and as Peter can't read their tone or facial expressions, he can't tell if they are emotionless, shy, or devious. They're so private that Peter never really learns much about them – and again, is this world-building?
And as for Peter's journey, I really appreciated that author Michel Faber treated him fairly: as a pastor, Peter's not a Bible-thumping, arrogant hypocrite, but rather, a loving and enthusiastic “witness of the word”. He offers to teach the Oasans about Buddhism and other paths to God but is delighted when they insist on Christianity as the truth. Because he didn't need to actually convert anyone, however, Peter's main struggle appears from home: nearly as soon as Peter left, Bea and the rest of the Earth are faced with climatic catastrophes, economic and societal collapse, and within a few months, it's pretty much chaos. As Peter grows to love his mission and finds himself even more connected to God through his work, messages from home show that Bea – who was the one who had first brought Peter to Christianity – was losing her faith.
And isn't that a little too pat? Within months of Peter leaving on a mission that both he and Bea were enthusiastic about, the world falls apart? I hate coincidences like that. I hate that when the pens exploded in Peter's luggage they left a giant blue cross on the front of his dishdasha which he then wore unironically.
And I hated that what looked like mysteries weren't. All the other USIC employees are good-natured but robotic, and when it was revealed that Grainger (the only character who seemed to show some emotion) preferred to spend $50/bottle for Earth water rather than drink the delightfully refreshing melon-flavoured local water, I had to wonder if there was some kind of a mind controlling agent in the water – but, nope. Grainger just liked Earth water. I also wondered about raisins – why was Grainger always eating raisin bread? Why were raisins specifically mentioned more than once as an expensive luxury from home? No reason. Why don't the apartments have locks on the doors? Beats me. Why did someone come pick up Peter every time he went for a walk for too long on the compound? Was there something he wasn't supposed to see? Nah, guess they were just being nice. When nothing happened and nothing happened and I was reaching the end of the book, I thought, “Something big is gonna happen now.” After the Oasans tell Peter that the wind never blows harder than a gentle riffle through his hair, and then he sees a giant thunderstorm and the swirling rain seems to be behaving strangely I thought, “Aha! By building the giant power plant, they've messed with the climate on Oases and won't it be ironic if USIC has inadvertently destroyed the planet that they've been grooming as Earth's Plan B?” But when Peter points out the strange weather, Grainger shrugs and says she's seen it all before. I wondered if there would eventually be a military wipeout of the Oasans – before the humans could learn that cultivating whiteflower involves a complex method of pollinating with the insects that feed off dead Oasans, thereby eliminating the only food source on the planet – but that didn't happen. When Peter and Grainger both decide that they wanted to go back to Earth to help their families through the chaos, I thought, “Aha, here's where we learn that USIC is just an evil corporation and you can check out, but you can never leave...” But, nope, no problem, we'll fire up the transport a month early just for you guys.
I didn't like the setting, I didn't like the characters, I didn't like the plot; I didn't even collect a bunch of examples of interesting writing. This wasn't a fascinating work of sci-fi, this wasn't a thought-provoking meditation on the limits of faith, this wasn't a cautionary tale, or an in-depth look at humanity under pressure:The Book of Strange New Things is too long by far, better suited to a Twilight Zone-length script; one from the end of the series' run where Rod Serling was running out of twists. I'd give it 2.5 stars but am rounding up to 3; it was just okay.
