Michel Faber's latest novel is a slow-paced exploration of well-worn themes, but it evokes those themes well enough that it has considerable power despite its drawbacks. In the near future, Peter is a Christian missionary to the natives of Oasis, an alien world on which a human corporation has set up a colony. At first, all seems to be going well: the natives are eager to hear Peter's message, and while the colonists are an eccentric bunch there seems to be no harm in them. But the news from Earth is more troubling: Peter's wife Beatrice (the name symbolism here is not subtle) reports an increasing number of tragedies large and small. As things get better on Oasis and worse on Earth, Peter will face difficult questions about love, faith, and purpose.

Pure narrative is not the novel's strong point. Peter, a reformed drug addict, has abandoned canniness and manipulation in favor of an indifferent absent-mindedness, which means that he never asks basic questions almost anyone else would. Like: what are the humans doing on Oasis? Why are the natives so eager to learn about Christianity? Readers familiar with science fiction on religious themes will be able to guess the general shape of the latter answer long before the novel even poses the question. Much of the middle 300 pages simply reiterates the characterization of Peter, Beatrice, the natives and the colonists, and Grainger, a troubled young woman who's the closest thing Peter has to a friend among the humans. Tidbits of world-building keep things from bogging down completely, but there's a fine line between deliberate pacing and over-indulgence.

And yet in its way the book is rather moving. The problem of how a thinking person perseveres in the face of life's cruelty is not a new one, and Faber's answer to it is likewise familiar, but the way events play out feels true to the paradoxes of human existence rather than reductive. Peter, who at first seems to be a genial caricature of Christian goodwill, has unexpected depths that reveal something about the downside of ecstatic faith, while Grainger's unhappiness has an integrity that captures and doesn't make light of the reality of despair. The quirks of the Oasans and the colonists expand the thematic reflection on the relationships among sense of purpose, belief, and love. While The Book of Strange New Things might have worked better if it were about 25-30% shorter, it's still an intriguing and rewarding addition to the subgenre of religious SF, and to the endless library of books on the unanswerable question of how and why people endure in a world that seems devoid of meaning.

Download File Size:3.07 MB

---