‘To give you an idea of the way people here consume stories, I have put this book together as a human would’ writes the alien narrator of Matt Haig’s novel The Humans. Professor Andrew Martin is not Professor Andrew Martin at all, but rather a Vonnedorian sent to destroy all evidence on Earth that Martin has solved the Riemann Hypothesis. This mathematical breakthrough, think the Vonnedorians, would lead to technological advances not safe in the hands of the violent and primitive humans. They must be stopped. Martin is murdered and his laptop destroyed. His wife, Isobel, and son, Gulliver, must also be killed; but perhaps a little predictably, what happens instead is that our alien begins to fall in love.
The greatest danger to this novel is its narrator. Imposter Andrew Martin is not accustomed to Earth. Everything is new for him, so we’re subjected to what Lyn Hejinian might call ‘the defamiliarization techniques with which we are so familiar’. The alien narrator is a version of the child narrator, allowing a kind of innocence and juvenility that’s meant to prompt the reader into seeing things afresh: ‘There was another photo. They were standing somewhere hot… They were among giant, crumbling stone columns under a perfectly blue sky. An important building from a former human civilisation. (On Earth, incidentally, civilisation is the result of a group of humans coming together and suppressing their instincts.)’
Haig writes things straight and doesn’t try to make the plot (other than the premise) wacky. Although we might grin knowingly, the narrator’s naivety is not the naivety of a child. We never feel superior, or think our understanding more sophisticated. For one thing, Martin’s recurring concern is how humans can bear mortality (Vonnedorians, like most other galactic life-forms, have ‘solved the problem of death’ and attained immortality). Potential cutesiness is laced with a dread of the abyss; descriptions of tasting peanut butter for the first time are punctuated with well-timed Beckettian asides (‘I had never enjoyed food before. Now I came to think of it, I had never enjoyed anything before’).
The narration doesn’t get dull, perhaps because a seemingly flippant book becomes quite serious. We witness the alien struggle daily to remove himself from the trappings of human emotion, which are dangerous to his mission. We’re faced with the sadness of keeping an identity secret in the face of a revelatory impulse; he can’t murder the humans if he likes them too much, nor if they know what he really is. And how would they react if they did know? He finds himself asking his unsuspecting wife, ‘… humans, in their natural state, are they good or are they bad, would you say? Can they be trusted? Or is their own real state just violence and cruelty?’ As she points out, it’s a very old question. The difference between this naive narrator and a childishly naive narrator is that here the wonderment grows from cynicism. In fact, we’re not witnessing a growth at all, but a regression of sorts. A deeply suspicious person slowly begins to reject a desire for invulnerability for something more nuanced. In a way, this is a subverted version of the coming-of-age novel.
Occasionally, the book slips a little too deeply into sentimentality. Leaving a list for his ‘son’ when he thinks he must leave, Martin writes: ‘You could disappear at any second. This one. Or this one. Make sure, as often as possible, you are doing something you’d be happy to die doing.’ Sentimentality, which no novelist wants to be taken down for, is on our author’s mind: ‘Sentimentality is another human flaw. A distortion. Another twisted by-product of love, serving no rational purpose. And yet, there was a force behind it as authentic as any other.’ Well, perhaps. But it makes for self-indulgent fiction.
Haig’s ambition grows as the book progresses — but even as he raises the stakes and risks the dreaded sentimentality, he treads the line between loftiness and mundanity with grace. Rather than ironize the cartoon quality of the premise and narrative device, he accepts them and writes seriously from within cartoonish confines. He undermines triviality with loftiness and loftiness with triviality. His poise is excellent. Just over half-way through, a chapter called ‘Sloping roofs (and other ways to deal with rain)’ boasts an epigraph from Hamlet on ‘the thousand natural shocks / That flesh is heir to’. Written out of context as is it here it looks like studiedly undercut melodrama, but in context it almost slips past unnoticed. The narrator has discovered Hamlet and is quoting him at us; but this doesn’t seem too heavy handed, perhaps because our narrator is discovering it for the first time. It seems there’s a strange tolerance for that: it’s not pretentiousness or delusional grandeur; it’s naivety. And that, ultimately, is the sophistication of this pointedly strange book.
The Humans by Matt Haig will be published on Thursday 9th May by Canongate Books. (£12.99)
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