The Humans

This book, a contemporary novel by Matt Haig, was entirely different to and better than what I expected. I received it as a 21st birthday present roughly a week ago and have devoured it already (it elbowed aside the other nine books I'm partway through by dint of being more engrossing), finally finishing it on the train to and from Manchester last night. I was expecting it to be a fairly standard funny-sharp-interesting read, but it had a completely unforeseen depth and strength which made it an enormously resonant experience. I guess one has to admit certain aspects of it make it indisputably a sci-fi but its core is a thoroughly feels-heavy drama.

   What's it about? Yikes. So, without giving too much of the plot away... There's a race of hyperintelligent aliens, who have achieved immortality and live in a perfectly logical utilitarian civilisation across the galaxy. They have reduced universal functions of all fields of knowledge - psychology, history, physics, whatever - into mathematics, which forms the basis of their mindset, and the means by which they assess goings-on around the universe, intervening whenever inefficiencies arise. An inefficiency arises: human mathematician Professor Andrew Martin proving the Riemann hypothesis, which has the potential to thrust humanity into a new epoch of technological capability, and humans are not psychologically well-equipped enough to deal with their explosively broadened potential, so the aliens intervene. Martin is killed, his physical form copied exactly and adopted by an alien agent (our compelling nameless narrator), whose purpose is then to remove all trace of the hypothesis's proof from Earth. This mission will entail deleting a few emails and killing a few people, including Martin's wife and son. However, the agent encounters steep learning curves: learning his way around human language and culture, learning his way around Andrew Martin's life, and learning his way around the emotional illogical aspects of humanity that are utterly alien to him. The first of these learning curves he overcomes quickly, albeit with some amusingly painful scenes toward the beginning. The second he blags largely, realising several aspects of the life of the man he's living in were not quite satisfactory (a depressed son, a neglected wife, an ill dog, a lack of appreciation for anything beautiful outside his work, an affair, no real friends, etc) and so in his stranger's assessment of them he makes fundamental character changes to "Andrew Martin" which throws up a variety of personal dramas. The third forms the central thread of the novel, heavily intertwined with the alien's learning to relate to Martin's wife and son, as he begins to experience feeling and see significance separate from blunt logic, even starting to question himself and his mission. All three pull together well, and the weirdness of the events befalling the human characters isn't clouded over by sentiment but are dealt with in ways that feel believable, driving up to a very hard-earned reward at the end.

   To pull off such a deep-relationship-feeling theme with such a weird-science-fiction premise is an undertaking of immense skill and sapience, and Matt Haig has done it pretty much bang on. The narration is as confusedly translucent as one would expect from a hyperintelligent being stuck learning his way about a human life; the dialogue feels natural and the characters are well-drawn; there is a rawness to the emotional aspects that is geniunely heart-tugging at points; and there is wisdom in spades. Not the motivational-poster contemporary-novel apothegms of it that we're so often hit with nowadays, but fully poignant nuggets of reasoned insightful wisdom that sound like exactly the kinds of things a hyperintelligent alien being would come out with once it had started reading Emily Dickinson and grown the ability to love.

   I'd like to go into detail with things it made me think about, but there were far too many, so expansive is the book's coverage of topics and yet contained its themes. Science and space and aliens, dogs' relationship to humans, technology's relationship to biology, peanut butter sandwiches, why poetry and music and wine are worth it, why clothes might not be and suicide certainly not so, fatherhood and matrimony and fidelity and the indefinable strings of semi-rationality that bind them in what we call "love", the links between logic and duty and emotion and how we define rightness based on them, how all subjects are effectively mathematics except the most important one which is living happily. There is much to provoke thought in this novel. 

   It's a very memorable book, written with equally warm intensity of head and heart and soul, very alien aspects melded into very human parts in an impressive and engaging character development. Even if sci-fi or drama isn't your thing, I recommend checking it out.