A review by zmull
The Book of Strange New Things by Michel Faber

2.0

I know that I am often swayed in my opinions by reviews. For that reason, I try to avoid them before I read something. About half way through The Book of Strange New Things I couldn't resist checking a few. I was curious, not so much about the critical opinion of the book, which I assumed was high based on the cover pull quotes and the marketing campaign, but because of the hard to miss racism and hints of homophobia. One character is literally compared to a monkey. Nearly every female character is described as "butch." What I found is almost no mention of these issues and an overwhelmingly positive reaction to the book. It's difficult to square the book I read with the reviews. The story follows a pastor sent to another planet to minister to the aliens there. The best sections of the book involve Peter, the main character, separated from his wife, and the slow unraveling of their marriage. There's a rawness to those scenes, especially the hopelessness of the minister and the anguish of the wife. But Peter has frustratingly underwritten motivations for his actions once on the planet Oasis. Faber seems to know this and plants the idea early on that the only people hired to travel to Oasis are people who can easily leave loved ones behind. Why this would be, given later revelations about the nature of the project, is hard to understand. Peter's life on Oasis is needlessly mysterious, with all of the human characters acting like they have a secret when they really don't. The aliens, the Oasans, are total cyphers. They have no personalities, no clear motivations for accepting Jesus (except a fear of death), and no social interactions outside of communicating with Peter. Worse, there's no conflict. They want to be Christians, Peter shows up and teaches them about Jesus. That's it. All of the tension in the story comes either from the vague mysteries of the earth people or from the, admittedly beautiful, husband/wife dynamic. David Mitchell called this novel a "masterpiece." Clearly, I'm missing something.