…readers of Under the Skin will recognize [Faber's] method: taking a standard science fiction premise and unfolding it with the patience and focus of a tai chi master, until it reveals unexpected connections, ironies and emotions. The Book of Strange New Things squeezes its genre ingredients to yield a meditation on suffering, love and the origins of religious faith…the reader is drawn through the book effortlessly, by the combination of incidental strangeness and the suspenseful handling of plot…Defiantly unclassifiable, The Book of Strange New Things is, among other things, a rebuke to the credo of literary seriousness for which there is no higher art than a Norwegian man taking pains to describe his breakfast cereal. As well as the literature of authenticity, Faber reminds us, there is a literature of enchantment, which invites the reader to participate in the not-real in order to wake from a dream of reality to the ineffability, strangeness and brevity of life on Earth.
The New York Times Book Review - Marcel Theroux
…eerie and ambitious…Faber proves himself to be, as he was in Under the Skin, a warm surrealist. In The Book of Strange New Things, his ruddy, swell-scrubbed sentences roll self-confidently along, in the manner of John Irving or Ethan Canin. There is little wasted motion…The novel becomes a portrait of a marriage in extremis, and an unlikely love story emerges. Mr. Faber sketches the details of life on another planet with finicky good sense as well as humor…[He] is a genuinely gifted storyteller…
The New York Times - Dwight Garner
07/21/2014 Faber’s (The Crimson Petal and the White) novel could at first be mistaken for another period piece, as a Christian missionary named Peter bids farewell to his devoted wife, Beatrice, and departs on a mission in foreign lands. Only gradually does the reader discover that the book is set in the far future, where half of what survives is owned by a shadowy company called USIC and that it is not the inhabitants of a mere continent whose souls Peter aims to save, but those of a whole new planet, known as Oasis. He finds willing converts in the alien Oasans—they are eager to learn each new lesson from the Bible, which they call The Book of Strange New Things—but his relations with his fellow human colonists are far rockier. What’s worse, Beatrice writes to Peter with grim reports of life back on Earth, where a series of calamities seems to signal the coming apocalypse; more devastating is her confession that she is pregnant with their child in an environment suddenly less hospitable to life than Oasis. Peter will come to question both the finer points of Scripture and his faith as he chooses between the old world and the new. Faber’s story isn’t eventful enough to support its length, and Beatice and Peter’s correspondence grows tiresome. But the book wears its strong premise and mixture of Biblical and SF tropes extremely well. (Oct.)
The Book of Strange New Things is Michel Faber’s second masterpiece, every bit as luminescent and memorable as The Crimson Petal and the White . It is a portrait of a living, breathing relationship, frayed by distance; it’s an enquiry into the mountains faith can move and the mountains faith can’t move. It is maniacally gripping and vibrant with wit. I didn’t so much read The Book of Strange New Things as inhabit it.” —David Mitchell “Michel Faber’s The Book of Strange New Things certainly lives up to its title. Faber, as he showed in Under the Skin , does strangeness brilliantly. I can’t remember being so continually and unfailingly surprised by any book for a long time, and part of the surprise is the tenderness and delicacy with which he shows an emotional relationship developing in one direction while withering in another. I found it completely compelling and believable, and admired it enormously.” —Philip Pullman “Weird and disturbing, like any work of genius, this novel haunted me for the seven nights I spent reading it, and haunts me still. A story of faith that will mesmerize believers and non-believers alike, a story of love in the face of the Apocalypse, a story of humanity set in an alien world—The Book of Strange New Things is desperately beautiful, sad, and unforgettable.” —David Benioff
09/01/2014 This latest book from Faber (The Crimson Petal and the White) begins as a pedestrian story about a missionary and then gets really interesting. After an emotional leave-taking from his wife, Bea, protagonist Peter is strapped into a hyperspace vehicle bound for a distant planet. Under the auspices of USIC, a corporation secretly colonizing the planet Oasis, Peter is tasked with serving the planet's indigenous population. A group of these cloaked humanoid beings has a hunger for the teachings of Jesus and the Bible, which they call "The Book of Strange New Things," and cultivating them is a priority because USIC needs the food they provide for a barren Oasis. Peter rapidly goes native and bonds with the aliens, though at the expense of his long-distance relationship with Bea. He learns the secret behind the aliens' love of Jesus and nearly dies in the process. VERDICT The grim plight of these enigmatic beings' lives explains their attachment to the Christian message, which puts it in a different light. Maria Doria Russell's The Sparrow meets the loneliness of Stanislaw Lem's Solaris; recommended for lovers of thought-provoking sf. [See Prepub Alert, 4/14/14.]—Henry Bankhead, Los Gatos Lib., CA
★ 2014-07-23 A long-awaited—and brilliant and disquieting—novel of faith and redemption by Scotland-based writer Faber (The Crimson Petal and the White, 2002, etc.). Eschatological religion and apocalypse make a natural fit. Throw in a distant planet that's not populated by L. Ron Hubbard acolytes, and you have an intriguing scenario prima facie. Peter (think about the name) is a minister who, aspiring to be useful, signs up for a stint, courtesy of one of the world's ruling corporations, on far-off Oasis, a forbidding chunk of rock on which the crew of the Nostromo, of Alien fame, wouldn't be out of place. "This was not Gethsemane: he wasn't headed for Golgotha, he was embarking on a great adventure." So he thinks, allowing for his habit of casting events in religiously hallucinogenic terms. The natives are shy—and who wouldn't be, given the rough humans who have come there before Peter—but receptive to his message, which deepens as Peter becomes more and more involved with his mission. Trouble is, things aren't good back on Earth: His wife, with child, is staring what appear to be the end times in the face, even as life on Oasis, as one human denizen snarls, turns out to be "sorta like the Rapture by committee." Is Peter good enough to make it through the second coming? He's lived, as we learn, a fully charged sinner's life before becoming saintly, and he's just one crisis of faith away from meriting incineration along with the rest of the unholy; good thing the alien-tongued aliens of Oasis will put in a good word for him, even though their tongue may not be entirely comprehensible. Faber's novel runs a touch long but is entirely true to itself and wonderfully original. It makes a fine update to Walter M. Miller Jr.'s Canticle for Leibowitz, with some Marilynne Robinson-like homespun theology thrown in for good measure. What would Jesus do if he wore a space helmet? A profoundly religious exploration of inner turmoil, and one sure to irk the Pat Robertson crowd in its insistence on the primacy of humanity.
When the USIC Corporation selects Christian minister Peter to witness alien life on a newly discovered planet, he’s thrilled—but sorry to leave his wife, Bea. As his mission progresses, Bea writes to him describing catastrophic events on Earth. Narrator Josh Cohen switches effortlessly between Peter’s assured British accent, Bea’s Yorkshire accent, and various others. Listeners will feel the hairs on the backs of their neck stand up upon hearing the eerie sounds of the aliens’ native language as well as their first halting attempts to speak English. However, the greater sense of unease comes from Cohen’s charged reading of Peter and Bea’s letters, which depict their uncertain marriage and faltering faith. E.M.C. © AudioFile 2014, Portland, Maine
NOVEMBER 2014 - AudioFile