The Book of Strange New Things

by Michel Faber

  Now, under that sun, he sat with his brethren on the mildest, most beautiful day yet. He imagined the scene from above – not very high above, but as if from a beach lifeguard’s observation tower. A tanned, lanky, blond-haired man in white, squatting on brown earth, encircled by small robed figures in all the colours of the rainbow. Everyone leaning slightly forward, attentive, occasionally passing a flask of water from hand to hand. Communion of the simplest kind.

  He hadn’t felt like this since he was six and his parents took him to the dunes in Snowdonia. That summer had been the happiest time of his life, as he’d luxuriated not just in the balmy weather but also in his parents’ reconciliation, all coos and hugs and soft words. Even the name ‘Snowdonia’ seemed magical, like an enchanted kingdom rather than a national park in Wales. He’d sat for hour upon hour in the dunes, soaking up the warmth and his parents’ togetherness, listening to their beningnly meaningless chatter and the lapping of the waves, gazing out at the sea from under his oversized straw hat. Unhappiness was a test that you had to pass, and he’d passed it, and everything would be all right from now on. Or so he’d thought, until his parents’ divorce.

  The language of the สีฐฉั was murder to pronounce but simple to learn. He had a hunch that there were probably only a few thousand words in the vocabulary – certainly far fewer than the quarter million in English. The grammar was logical and transparent. No eccentricities, no traps. There were no cases, no distinctions between singular and plural, no genders, and only three tenses: past, present and future. Even to call them tenses was a stretch: the สีฐฉั didn’t think that way. They classified a thing according to whether it was gone, or it was here, or it was expected to come.

  ‘Why did you leave the original settlement?’ he asked, at one point. ‘The place where you were living when USIC first came. You left it. Did something go wrong between you and USIC?’

  ‘We are here now,’ they replied. ‘Here good.’

  ‘But was there a problem?’

  ‘No problem. We are here now.’

  ‘It must have been very difficult to build everything again, from nothing.’

  ‘Building no problem. Every day a สีmall work more. สีmall work upon สีmall work, day upon day, then the work done.’

  He tried a different tack. ‘If USIC had never come, would you still be living in the original settlement?’

  ‘Here good.’

  Evasiveness? He wasn’t sure. The สีฐฉั language didn’t appear to contain any conditionals. There was no if.

  The home of my Father have room upon room upon room, read one of his Bible paraphrases, carefully refashioned to avoid troublesome words like ‘house’ and ‘mansions’. As for John’s next bit, ‘if it were not so, I would have told you’, he’d ditched it and moved straight on to I will prepare a room for you – which in retrospect was a wiser decision than he’d known at the time, because the สีฐฉั wouldn’t have understood what John’s ‘if it were not so’ assurance was supposed to mean. One of the most direct, straight-talking asides in the whole Bible was arcane nonsense here.

  And yet, however many problems the สีฐฉั might have with English, it was agreed that Peter would continue to speak of God and Jesus in his own tongue. His flock would have it no other way. The Book of Strange New Things was not translatable, they knew that. In foreign phrases, exotic power lurked.

  But there was more to life than God and Jesus, and Peter wanted to share these people’s mundane reality. Just a few days after he started to learn the language, he overheard two Jesus Lovers talking, and was delighted to pick up, amongst the meaningless sussurus, a reference to a child refusing breakfast, or maybe not refusing, but doing something with or at breakfast that the grown-ups disapproved of. It was a trivial detail, and his understanding of it made no difference to anything, yet it made a huge difference to how he felt. In that modest moment of comprehension, he was a little less an alien.

  ‘Breakfast’ was ‘ڇสีน รี่ณ สค’ – literally, ‘first food after sleep’. A great many สีฐฉั words were composites of other words. Or maybe they were phrases, it was hard to tell. The สีฐฉั made no distinction. Did that mean they were vague? Well, yes and no. He got the impression there was a word for every thing – but just one. Poets would have a hard time here. And a single word might refer to an activity, a concept and a location all in one, as in สสีณ, which referred to the whiteflower fields, whiteflower in general, and the farming of the crop. Pronouns didn’t exist; you just repeated the noun. You repeated a lot of things.

  ‘สครี่ สีฐ?’ he asked Jesus Lover Twenty-Eight one day, proud that he could manage ‘Your child?’ in the สีฐฉั language. A small person, clearly not yet mature, was dawdling near the church, waiting for her to finish her worship and return home.

  ‘ณ,’ she confirmed.

  Observing the child, he felt sad that there were no children in his congregation. The Jesus Lovers were all grown-ups.

  ‘Why don’t you keep him by your side?’ he asked. ‘He’s welcome to join us.’

  Ten, twenty, thirty seconds went by while they stood there, watching the child watch them. A breeze fluttered the boy’s cowl, and he raised his tiny hands to adjust it.

  ‘He no love Jeสีuสี,’ Jesus Lover Twenty-Eight said.

  ‘He doesn’t have to,’ said Peter. ‘He could just sit with you, listen to the singing. Or sleep.’

  More time passed. The boy stared down at his boots, shifting his weight from one foot to the other.

  ‘He no love Jeสีuสี,’ Jesus Lover Twenty-Eight said.

  ‘Maybe in the future.’

  ‘Maybe,’ she said. ‘I hope.’ And she walked out of the church into the shimmering heat. Mother and son fell into step without a word. They didn’t hold hands, but then สีฐฉั seldom did.

  How much did her child’s lack of Christian fellowship grieve her? How contemptuous or tolerant was this boy of his mother’s faith? Peter couldn’t tell. And asking Lover Twenty-Eight about it probably wouldn’t yield much insight. The lack of self-absorption he’d noted in these people from the outset went deep into the language itself: there were no words for most of the emotions that humans devoted endless energy to describing. The sort of intimate confab that longtime girlfriends indulged in, analysing whether a feeling was True Love or merely lust, affection, infatuation, habit, dysfunction, blah blah blah, was inconceivable here. He couldn’t even be sure if there was a word for anger, or if ‘รี่ฉ้ณ’ merely denoted disappointment, or a neutral recognition that life wasn’t turning out as planned. As for ‘ฉนณ’, the word for faith . . . its meaning was not what you’d call precise. Faith, hope, intention, objective, desire, plan, wish, the future, the road ahead . . . these were all the same thing, apparently.

  Learning the language, Peter understood better how his new friends’ souls functioned. They lived almost wholly in the present, focusing on the tasks at hand. There was no word for yesterday except ‘yeสีรี่erday’. This didn’t mean the สีฐฉั had a poor memory; they just lived with memory differently. If someone dropped a dish and broke it, they would remember next day that the dish was broken, but rather than reliving the incident when the dish fell, they would be preoccupied with the need to make a new dish. Locating a past event in measured time was something they could do with great effort, as a special favour, but Peter could tell they didn’t see the point. Why should it matter exactly how many days, weeks, months or years ago a relative had died? A person was either living amongst them or in the ground.

  ‘Do you miss your brother?’ he asked Jesus Lover Five.

  ‘Brother here.’

  ‘I mean the one that died. The one that’s . . . in the ground.’

  She remained utterly still. If she’d had eyes he could recognise, he suspected she would be staring at him blankly.

  ‘Do you feel pain that he is in the ground
?’

  ‘He feel no pain in the ground,’ she said. ‘Before he go in the ground, he feel pain. Big, very big pain.’

  ‘But you? Do you feel pain? Not in your body, but in your spirit? Thinking of him, being dead?’

  She shuddered gently. ‘I feel pain,’ she conceded after half a minute or so. ‘I feel pain.’

  It was like a guilty triumph, extracting this confession from her. He knew that the สีฐฉั felt deep emotions, including grief; he sensed it. They weren’t solely practical organisms. They couldn’t be, or they wouldn’t have such an intense need for Christ.

  ‘Have you ever wished you were dead, Jesus Lover Five?’ He knew her real name now, and could even make a fair stab at pronouncing it, but she’d let him know that she preferred him to call her by her Christian honorific. ‘I have,’ he went on, hoping for a breakthrough in rapport. ‘At various bad times in my life. Sometimes the pain is so great, we feel it would be better not to be alive.’

  She was silent for a long while. ‘Beรี่er be alive,’ she said at last, staring down at one of her gloved hands as if it contained a profound secret. ‘Dead no good. Alive good.’

  Getting to grips with the language brought him no closer to understanding the origins of สีฐฉั civilisation. The สีฐฉั never alluded to what had happened in their collective past and appeared to have no concept of ancient history – their own or anyone else’s. For example, they either didn’t grasp, or considered irrelevant, the fact that Jesus walked the earth several thousand years ago; it might as well have been last week.

  In this, they were, of course, excellent Christians.

  ‘Tell me about Kurtzberg,’ he asked them.

  ‘Kurรี่สีberg gone.’

  ‘Some of the workers at USIC say cruel things about that. I think they’re not serious, but I can’t be sure. They say you killed him.’

  ‘Kill him?’

  ‘Made him dead. Like the Romans made Jesus dead.’

  ‘Jeสีuสี no dead. Jeสีuสี alive.’

  ‘Yes, but he was killed. The Romans beat him and nailed him to the cross and he died.’

  ‘God iสี miracle. Jeสีuสี no longer dead.’

  ‘Yes,’ agreed Peter. ‘God is miracle. Jesus no longer dead. But what happened to Kurtzberg? Is he alive too?’

  ‘Kurรี่สีberg alive.’ A dainty gloved hand gestured at the empty landscape. ‘Walking. Walking, walking, walking.’

  Another voice said: ‘He leave uสี in need of him.’

  Another voice said: ‘You no leave uสี.’

  ‘I will have to go home eventually,’ he said. ‘You understand that.’

  ‘Home here.’

  ‘My wife is waiting for me,’ he said.

  ‘Your wife Bea.’

  ‘Yes,’ he said.

  ‘Your wife Bea: one. We are many.’

  ‘A very John Stuart Mill observation.’ At this, they twitched their shoulders in fretful incomprehension. He should have known better than to say it. The สีฐฉั did not ‘do’ witticism or irony. So why had he bothered?

  Maybe he was saying it to Bea, as if she were here to hear.

  Solemn truth: If Bea hadn’t been OK, he wouldn’t have come. He would have postponed his visit, stayed at the base. The disappointment his flock would have felt was a far less serious thing than the distress of the woman he loved. But, to his enormous relief, she had listened to his pleas and prayed.

  And, of course, God had come through.

  I went to bed frightened and angry and lonely, I must confess, she’d written to him. I was expecting to wake up in a state of suppressed panic, as usual, my arms folded around my face to ward off whatever nasty surprise the day had in store for me. But next morning, the whole world was different.

  Yes, that’s what God could do. Bea had always known that, but she’d forgotten it, and now she knew it again.

  I may have mentioned (but probably not), her morning-after-prayer letter went on, that the central heating has been gurgling/thumping/stuttering all day & night for weeks, and suddenly the house was quiet. I figured the boiler must have given up the ghost, but no, it was fine. Everything working smoothly. As if God just laid a finger on it and said ‘Behave yourself’. Joshua seemed more at ease, stroking himself against my shins the way he used to. I made a cup of tea and realised I had no morning sickness. Then there was a knock on the door. I thought it was the postman, until I remembered that deliveries have been coming in the afternoon if they’ve come at all. But it was four fresh-faced young men, maybe mid-20s, very macho. For a moment I was scared they might rape me and rob me. A lot of that’s been going on lately. But guess what? They wanted to remove the piles of stinking garbage! They had a four-wheel drive and a trailer. Their accents were Eastern European, I think. They’ve been driving all over the area doing this.

  ‘The system is gone to hell!’ one of them said, big grin on his face. ‘We are the new system!’

  I asked them how much they’re charging. I expected them to say 200 quid or something.

  ‘Give us 20 pounds!’

  ‘And a bottle of some kind of nice drink!’

  I told them I didn’t have any alcohol in the house.

  ‘Then give us . . . 30 pounds!’

  ‘And think in your mind that we are good strong amazing guys!’

  They cleared the lot in two minutes flat. They were showing off, tossing heavy bags into the trailer with one hand, doing leapfrog on the wheelie bins, stuff like that. It was bitter weather, I was shivering in a parka, and these guys were in thin sweatshirts, skintight so that their muscles were well displayed.

  ‘We come to your rescue, yeah?’

  ‘Every day you think, When is somebody gonna come, and today . . . we come!’

  ‘Don’t trust the government, it is bullshit. They say, You want the mess cleaned up but it’s too much problem. Bullshit! It’s not problem! Five minutes work! Good strong guys! Finished!’ He was beaming, sweating, he seemed perfectly warm.

  I gave them a 50 pound note. They gave me 20 change, then drove off with the garbage, waving bye-bye. The street looked and smelled civilised for the first time in weeks.

  I wanted to tell someone what had just happened, so I phoned Claire. I almost didn’t – I’ve hardly used the phone for ages, there’s been this hideous crackling on the line, you can barely hear the other person. But this time it was totally noise-free. Again, I thought it must be dead, but it was just working as it should. Claire was not surprised by my news; she’s heard about these guys. They make a fortune, she says, because they visit maybe forty homes every day at £20 a pop. Funny how a service you’re accustomed to paying a few pence for (in tax) suddenly seems cheap at a hundred times the price.

  Anyway, the story gets better. Claire said she’d had a strong mental picture of me ever since she went to bed last night – ‘as if someone beamed it into my head’, she said. She and Keith are moving to Scotland (they got a third of what they originally paid for their house and feel lucky to have sold it) to a much smaller, scummier (Claire’s word) place because at least they have a support network there. Anyway, they packed up their possessions and Claire decided she no longer needs half the clothes she’s accumulated over the years. So, rather than putting them into a charity bin, which is risky nowadays because people use them for garbage, she brought over three huge bin-bags full. ‘Take what you want for yourself, Bee Bee; the rest can go to the church,’ she said. When I opened the bags I almost cried. Claire is exactly the same size as me, if you recall (you probably don’t) and I’ve always loved her taste in clothes. I’m not a covetous person but there were things in those bags that I used to lust after when I’d see Claire wearing them. Well, I’m wearing one of them right now! – a lilac cashmere pullover that’s so soft you keep touching it to make sure it’s real. It must have cost 10 x more than anything I’ve ever had on my body apart from my wedding dress. And there are fancy leggings as well
– beautifully embroidered, works of art. If you were here I would give you a little fashion parade. Can you even remember what I look like? No, don’t answer that.

  I start back at work tomorrow. Rebecca tells me that Goodman has gone on holiday! Is that good news or what! And my hand has healed up very nicely. There was still some tingling in the nerves before but that’s completely gone now.

  I went out to the supermarket today and there was more stock on the shelves than there’s been for ages. I remarked on it to the manager and he gave me such a smile. ‘We aim to please,’ he said. I suddenly realised what a nightmare he’s been living through; it’s only a lousy supermarket but it’s his baby. Speaking of which – did I already mention No Morning Sickness? Just cravings, cravings, cravings. But in the supermarket, I scored – wait for it (I certainly have!) – a chocolate dessert! I suppose it’s kind of trivial to claim that God delivers chocolate when you really, really want it. But maybe he does.

  Chocolate and cashmere pullovers. Weirdly exotic things they seemed to him, under the vast sky of Oasis, observing the incremental progress of ڇ from horizon to horizon. And of course he’d been reminded of Matthew 6:25 when he’d read Bea’s letter. But he knew she was touchy lately and might not appreciate being reminded of Jesus’s cautions against getting too concerned with food and clothes. The main thing was that she felt encouraged and restored. She’d been in danger of slipping adrift from God’s protection and now she was back in it. Thank you, thank you, thank you, Lord, he prayed. He trusted she was doing the same.

  USIC had promised him that they would build a transmitter for Shoot access right near his church very soon, maybe even before his next visit to C-2. So this was the last time he would be out in the field without the chance to share his day-to-day impressions with Bea. Once the Shoot was in place, neither of them would be unreachable anymore.