The Book of Strange New Things

by Michel Faber

Coaxed into this exchange, the two strangers relaxed despite themselves. Within minutes they were even laughing. They were from Merton, they had diabetes and depression respectively, they both worked in a hardware superstore, they’d saved up for this holiday for a year. They were none too bright and not very fascinating. The woman had an unattractive snort and the man stank terribly of musk aftershave. They were human beings, and precious in the eyes of God.

But no. He mustn’t let himself be deluded by imaginary horrors. God was never cruel. Life could be cruel, but not God. In a universe made dangerous by the gift of free will, God could be relied upon for support no matter what happened, and He appreciated the potentials and limitations of each of His children.

“Too good to be true?” Grainger shook her head. “No offense, but that’s what some people might say about religion. Not about a simple duty roster for keeping your vehicles’ engines from corroding.”

“Most true things are kind of corny, don’t you think? But we make them more sophisticated out of sheer embarrassment. Simple truths with complicated clothes on. The only purpose of the linguistic dressing-up is so people won’t look at the contents of our naked hearts and minds and say ‘How naff.’ ”

Addicts don’t handle praise well. The pressure of living up to it drives them back to drink and drugs.”

Sometimes a statement of the bloody obvious was the only appropriate way forward. As if to give life ceremonious permission to proceed.

That was the sort of thing crazy people did—instinctively choosing the experiences that confirmed their own negative attitudes.

“It’s worth trying. Don’t expect the most wonderful thing on earth and you won’t be disappointed.” “A sound philosophy as a general rule,” he said.

There were some people you would never click with, no matter how many times you tried, no matter how many shared experiences came your way, and maybe Moro was one of those.

The conversation they were supposed to have had, which he had so embarrassingly forgotten, threatened to grow to mythical proportions: a grand tour of everything, with scripted commentary answering all conceivable questions. He should bear in mind that there was a limit to how much she could have passed on to him at first sight.

And then there was Beatrice, on the day when he proposed to her, a day on which every conceivable thing had gone wrong. He’d proposed at 10:30 in the morning, in sweltering heat, as they stood at an automatic teller machine in the high street, preparing to do some grocery shopping at the supermarket. Maybe he should have gone down on one knee, because her “Yes, let’s” had sounded hesitant and unromantic, as though she regarded his proposal as nothing more than a pragmatic solution to the inconvenience of high rents. Then the teller machine had swallowed her debit card and she’d had to go into the bank to sort it out, which involved a meeting with the manager and a lamentable episode in which she was grilled for half an hour as if she was an imposter trying to defraud another Beatrice whose card she had stolen. This humiliation ended with Bea canceling her relationship with the bank in a righteous fury. They’d gone shopping then, but were able to afford barely half the things on their list, and, when they emerged into the car park, they found that a vandal had scratched a crude swastika into the paintwork of their car. If it had been anything other than a swastika—a cartoon penis, a swear word, anything—they would probably have just lived with it, but this they had no choice but to get fixed, and it would cost them a fortune. And so the day went on: Bea’s phone ran out of battery and died, the first garage they drove to was shut, the second garage was booked up solid and no...

There was an art to walking slower than your instinct told you to, keeping pace with a much smaller person, yet not appearing exasperated or clumsy. The trick was to pretend you were wading through waist-deep water, watched by a judge who would award you points for poise.

The Oasans were scrupulous in their respect for others, and gossip was not their style, but Peter gradually got the message that Lover Sixty-Three was disfigured or malformed in some way. Nothing specific was said, only a general sense that Lover Sixty-Three was a pathetic character, soldiering on as though he was normal when everyone could see he wasn’t.

If we were rural Chinese, and somebody asked us to describe someone else, we wouldn’t say, “She’s got straight black hair, dark brown eyes, she’s about five foot three” and so on. We’d have to get more into the nuances. Whereas in the West there’s so much diversity we can say “He’s six foot two with blonde frizzy hair and pale blue eyes,” and that immediately sets him apart from the crowd.

“When I get stressed about stuff that’s out of my control,” Maneely counseled him, “I often remember an ancient poem. It’s, like, thousands of years old. It goes: Grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.” “Written by a guy called Reinhold Niebuhr,” Peter said. “Except that he actually wrote ‘God grant.’ ” “Well, maybe, but it works just as well without.”

What Bea was facing now, they had faced together many times in the past. Not the precise circumstances, but the feeling that life had become unbearably complicated, a tangled network of insoluble problems, each requiring all the others to be solved before any progress could be made. It was in the nature of a troubled soul to regard this as objective reality, a hard look at the grim facts that were revealed once the rose-colored glasses were off. But this was a distortion, a tragic misconception. It was the frenzy of the moth butting against the lightbulb when there was an open window nearby. God was that open window.

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, analyzing 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 “PDH” merely denoted disappointment, or a neutral recognition that life wasn’t turning out as planned. As for “UFH,” 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.

Weakened by the analgesics and the shock of Bea’s message—which returned to his mind over and over like a wave of nausea—he was suddenly overcome by a belief that other men had often described to him when he’d given them pastoral counseling—a deep, despondent conviction that no matter what they did, no matter how good their intentions, they were doomed to bitterly disappoint women.

The man who’d once littered his conversation with casual expletives like “Jesus fucking Christ” became the man who said “gosh.” There was no other way. You were either a raging alcoholic or you didn’t touch drink. Same with cynicism. Bea could handle it—in moderation. He couldn’t.

How much would you miss Philadelphia?

She wasn’t his soul mate: he had no illusions about that. The intimacies he had once shared with Bea were impossible with her; she would quickly find him ridiculous, and he would find her too much trouble. In fact, like most men and women who had made love since the beginning of time, they had almost nothing in common. Except that they were male and female, thrown together by circumstances, and, for the moment at least, alive. He lifted his hand, held it in space, prepared to settle his palm, gently, on her breast.

“For where your treasure is, there will your heart be also.”