Faber soars with emotional 'New Things'
At the same time that Interstellar is hitting theaters, a thought-provoking and profoundly moving novel takes the concept of inhabiting a distant planet to the next level.
Clearly the notion that Earth may soon be uninhabitable is on the minds of those who create art.
But where Interstellar shoehorns in a domestic drama into what is essentially a story of space exploration, Michel Faber'sThe Book of Strange New Things uses intergalactic travel and planet colonization as a backdrop, even a mechanism, to explore complicated emotional terrain.
The physical setting of the novel is otherworldly. But the most salient environment in Faber's story is one readers will find familiar: a marriage at a crossroads.
Though significantly shorter than his best-selling 2002 novel, The Crimson Petal and the White, Faber's third full-length novel is deeply ambitious and his prose resounding.
While it probes the mysteries of a marital relationship, something literature does well -- think Ian McEwan's On Chesil Beach -- Faber's new novel book also features some stunningly vivid, even cinematic, elements. Not surprisingly, it's already been optioned for a TV miniseries.
The majority of the saga takes place on a habitable planet named Oasis. It's an ironic name for a planet devoid of natural bodies of water, animals and most vegetation.
But Oasis has its stark beauty.
Drinking water is green and has the faintly sweet taste of honeydew melon. Nights and days are much longer than on earth. But most notable are the small hooded inhabitants which Peter Leigh, the protagonist, calls Oasans, but whom many of the other human settlers refer to more derisively.
Peter is a Christian minister who has come to spread the word of God to the Oasans. He is also deeply in love with his supportive wife Bea. We learn that they both applied for the mission, but only Peter was accepted to make the journey by the shadowy corporation that runs things on Oasis. USIC -- an acronym that is never spelled out for the reader — is presumably a multi-national entity, but its intentions for colonization are murky.
"I've got the feeling that I'm being used by USIC for some purpose that has yet to be revealed," Peter writes Bea through a kind of inter-galactic e-mail system called "the shoot."
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The plan is for Peter to tend to his new flock for an unspecified time, then return home to Bea, who remains in England with their beloved cat.
Shortly after Peter takes off on his mission, Earth is rocked by a succession of disasters. On Oasis, particularly in the sterile enclave where most the human settlers reside, things are almost unnaturally copacetic. A bit more development of the back stories of Peter's human counterparts might have enhanced the reader's connection with these characters.
It has been widely reported that Faber originally planned to write a novel focused on aliens and life on a weirdly remote planet. But the cancer diagnosis of his longtime partner Eva Youren changed the direction of his work. The novel became an emotionally wrenching drama of a couple separated by vast distance, struggling to understand one another.
The Book of Strange New Things offers a vivid portrait of a distant galaxy, reinforced by a narrative that is deeply, emotionally evocative. This rare blend makes for a fascinating read that is equally absorbing in its portrait of extra-terrestrials and its examination of faith and the fragility of human relations.
The Book of Strange New Things
By Michel Faber
Hogarth
3.5 stars out of four