The Book of Strange New Things

by Michel Faber

“Well, this project here,” declared Tartaglione, imperious in contempt, “is sorta like the Rapture by committee. Rapture Incorporated. The Department of Rapture.

We are all specialized forms of survivor, Peter reminded himself. We lack what we fundamentally need and forge ahead regardless, hurriedly hiding our wounds, disguising our ineptitude, bluffing our way through our weaknesses.

She stood up, and he noted once again that she wasn’t very tall. Yet at this moment, he felt smaller still; he was the little boy who’d let his brand-new bicycle get stolen, he was the pitiful disgrace slumped on a vomit-stained sofa in the Salford Pentecost Powerhouse, he was the fumbling missionary who’d reached the end of his rope—and each of these Peters could only throw himself on the mercy of a long-suffering female, a mother who might reassure him that he was more valuable than any expensive gift, a wife who might reassure him that he could break a sacred promise and still be loved, a friend who might be able to pull him out of his latest crisis. When it came down to it, it was not Jesus but these women on whose mercy he threw himself, and who must decide if he’d finally gone too far.

FOR ALL THAT I’VE HAD AND SEEN, I AM TRULY THANKFUL,

The blaze of light where His head should be and the eye-shaped holes in His starfish hands, which Peter had once taken as evidence that God could not be confined to the iconography of one race, now struck him as proof of an unbreachable gulf.

The SLM had been keen to follow him to the kingdom of Heaven, but they weren’t keen to follow him into the valley of doubt. He knew that one day—maybe very soon—they would have another pastor. They’d taken from him what they needed, and their search for salvation would go on when he was long gone. After all, their souls dreamt so ardently of a longer stay in the flesh, a longer spell of consciousness. It was natural: they were only human.