Review of “The Book Of Strange New Things”
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:date: 2017-01-04T16:34:42
:status: draft
:category: literature
:tags: tags

The book called “`The Book Of Strange New Things`_” [#]_  by
Michel Faber is a combination of sci-fi with the
marriage-on-the-edge-of-falling-appart psychological novel. The
plot is rather simple: pastor of small English church is sent by
a strange private corporation USIC to the other galaxy (or
something like that, somewhere far far away) to be the Christian
missionary for aliens. However, the focus of the book is not
a space opera of meeting with aliens (although that’s included)
but a strain this put on the relationship with his wife, who is
living through complete collapse of the Earth civilization (looks
very much like the End of Times in Matthew 24). I won’t describe
more, because they I would trip about some spoiler.

Michel Faber is without any doubts absolutely stellar story
teller and the focus of the book is great telling of the troubled
relationship over very (I mean very) long distance. For some
technical reasons, only something like email (censored as it
turns out) works. No MIME, no images, nothing else than plain
text. Of course, it is a great limitation for the written novel,
and it also boosts all communication problems between the
spouses. The husband suffers a lot with his inability to describe
completely undescribable world in which he has to live in
(although of course, the novelist himself describes that world
quite persuasively, but how much letters you can write in a bit
of free time the pastor has?), his wife is constantly frustrated
with her inablility to describe smelly dangerous wilderness into
which whole England quite fast changes.

Pastor (and the reader) is quite surprised by the fact that
around hundred of local aliens are actually already Christians,
albeit in horribly legalistic, bit sectarian, most likely The
King James Version Only form (although, KJV is the only normal
Bible translation used in the book, which is a bit weird for
supposedly a bit liberal pastor). The aliens are quite different
from any human form (although apparently humans are able to eat
the aliens’s produced food), the pastor is not even certain about
their sex, and the only mean of communication is their rather
broken knowledge of English. Only after some time the pastor
comes with the surprising revelation that The King James Version
is not the best Biblical translation for the communication with
aliens (ehm) and starts to create himself some kind The Living
Translation-like retranslations of KJV into simplified English
(also, aliens have problems with pronouncing consonants,
especially some). If the pastor asked me before leaving the
Earth, I would tell him to pack NLT or some similar version.

Anyway, the pastor during his stays in the aliens village (for
various reasons he has to return after every couple of days to
the human base) sinks more and more into going native, he starts
to learn the local language (first human to do so, apparently),
and feels finally a way closer to the aliens than to humans on
their base.

There are books which are filled with the meaning from the start
to the bottom and we are not completely surprised by the end
(e.g., The Lord of the Rings; who of you, my dear readers,
expected that Frodo fails his task, The Dark Lord wins, whole
world falls into Darkness, the end of the story?). There are
other books which are more preparation for the final surprising
punchline (e.g., 2001: A Space Odyssey; and yes, there is a lot
of good story-telling even during the novel, but it all points
towards the end). These two examples show hopefully well, that
neither of these models of novel is inherently superior to the
other, and both can lead to excellent books (like these two
examples) or to something not so excellent.

One of few 

.. [#] Yes, it *is* confusing; the book mentioned in the title is
    The Bible as called by the local alien believers.

.. _`The Book Of Strange New Things`:
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Book_Of_Strange_New_Things