A U.K. highway surrounded by ordinary earthly beauty, a lone hitchhiker along its shoulder: the opening pages of Michel Faber's awesome new novel – which he claims will be his last – will immediately summon up memories of his first. Indeed, The Book of Strange New Things makes a compelling companion to Under the Skin, Faber's indelible 2000 debut: both are intelligent works of science fiction that will appeal to readers not generally drawn to the genre; both closely shadow their protagonists, who venture to strange new lands with only limited knowledge of what they'll encounter there; both turn on a series of brilliantly crafted reveals. But where the relatively trim Under the Skin possessed a tightly controlled, ultimately quite simple narrative and only two characters of note, this ambitious new Book is expansive, brimming with story and secondary players. Where Under the Skin paid tribute to the wonders of life on our planet as experienced by an outsider, The Book of Strange New Things achieves the arguably more difficult task of imagining a completely foreign world and allowing one of our own to admire its alien allure.
Peter Leigh is a 33-year-old English minister delivered to an unfathomably distant, apparently inhabitable planet dubbed Oasis. He's to play missionary to the mysterious race of humanoid creatures with whom his employer, a powerful corporate entity calling itself USIC, is trying to forge a sustainable interdependency. Living in small villages of austere design, the Oasans resemble placid, diminutive variations on homo sapiens, the most notable differences being their inability to pronounce numerous sounds needed to speak any human tongue and faces that Peter can only describe as looking like foetuses. To Peter's astonished delight, he finds the Oasans hungry for the word of God, specifically the God invoked in the New Testament. (The novel's rather braggadocio title is actually derived from the name Oasans give to the Bible.) Spending long stretches of time living amongst the Oasans, Peter goes about preaching the teachings of Jesus and overseeing the construction of a church.
The conflicts that accumulate over the course of The Book of Strange New Things largely derive from the myriad challenges involved in adapting to an entirely new environment without losing a sense of one's roots. Peter's struggle to maintain interest in life on Earth, which from all reports seems to be spiralling into catastrophe, or even in the life of Beatrice, the beloved spouse he left behind, is exacerbated by the insidious, eerie psychic effects of life on Oasis, which seem to include a gradual depletion of affect or desire and, for Peter, who spends more time away from the USIC base than any of his fellow Earthlings, a steadily eroding grip on reality. Most ominous amidst the novel's early events is the unexpected discovery that Peter had a predecessor, a missionary by the conspicuous name of Kurtzberg, who "went native," and vanished without a trace. (The allusion to Heart of Darkness is a rare example of Faber making an arguably too-obvious reference, though a closing acknowledgment suggests the name was actually chosen in honour of Marvel Comics pioneer Jack Kirby, né Jacob Kurtzberg.)
The Book of Strange New Things prizes immersion above economy and, like Faber's bestselling Victorian melodrama The Crimson Petal and the White, opts to err on the side of abundant detail. (The Book also owes some debts to Victorian fiction; like the novels of Albert Sanchez Pinol, it looks back to the literature of that period not only to revive its best adventure-story tropes, but also to reflect on the ugly legacy of colonialism it foreshadowed.) Several bits of exposition are repeated and feel somewhat redundant; lengthy correspondence between Peter and Beatrice, featuring much news on the plight of various acquaintances and on the couple's cat, are quoted in their entirety, as is one of Peter's sermons. So there's a slight bagginess to certain chapters, but here's the payoff: Faber needs time, colour and verticality to truly get under his newest protagonist's skin, to usher in his formidable insights into, for example, the way language can become a key to unlocking the deepest mysteries; the way damaged people can recognize the invisible scars in another; the way faith can transcend dogma; or the ways that distance can wreak havoc on love's equilibrium, throwing a lover's sense of self, so dependent on their partner's gaze, out of joint.
Which brings us back to Faber's announcement that this Book is to be his last, a decision prompted by the death of Eva Youren, his companion of 26 years, from multiple myeloma following a prolonged illness. It's impossible not to regard Peter and Beatrice's heartbreaking separation as something of a mirror to Faber's own grief, or Faber's evocation of a world slipping toward apocalypse as a mirror to the author's own private apocalypse. I've read that Youren, like many a writer's spouse, was Faber's first reader and editor, his closest collaborator. We're accustomed to thinking of novels as the products of a single mind, but Faber's resolve to retire in the midst of what would seem his prime – he's only 56, and didn't begin publishing until about 15 years ago – reminds us that art isn't created in a vacuum.
Faber is a writer of extraordinary gifts, but is it tragic that he should leave writing? He worked as a nurse for a decade before pursuing his writing career; who's to say his time won't be just as well spent returning to that earlier vocation? His stories are characterized by their macroscopic view, an ability to place individual life in a cosmic context; what's the big deal if one good, grief-stricken writer lays down his pen before he's exhausted his talent? These are legitimate questions, but they're also questions of stoic bravado. Writers tell themselves fictions to arrive at a greater truth. I would not be surprised if Faber's retirement is not itself a kind of necessary fiction, doubtlessly essential to the terrible process of mourning, but disposable once life, however painfully, goes on.
José Teodoro is a Toronto-based critic and playwright.