Your thoughts

[Victoria]

When you've finished the book, give your first impressions or thoughts here. Did you like it? What did it mean to you? What struck you particularly (positive or negative?)

[Victoria]

I really loved this book. Mainly for very personal reasons; the account of someone observing humanity from the outside, finding it all very strange and feeling profoundly separate from 'other people' and their experience is something which I find very personally familiar. Hence my initial interpretation that it was about mental illness, and there would be a "Sixth Sense"-like twist at some point which would prove that he really was the old Andrew Martin, that it had been a breakdown with deliberate repression/amnesia.

This interpretation was informed by what I'd read about the book before I started it (I knew that the author felt it was very personal, and related to his own mental health story) but I actually held on to this interpretation quite stubbornly, almost until the end. Even when he killed David Russell, and he remarked that he had done it in a way nobody could understand, I still thought that there must be an explanation; he just believes he has these powers. As a result, I read the whole thing with a terrible, and quite upsetting, sense of dread at what he might do. The alien's moral transformation and learning process was coloured, for me, with the possibility that this was not a blank slate, an alien who had to learn about human morality from scratch, but a human whose morality (already dodgy...) had been profoundly damaged or rewritten by a breakdown, and who was therefore capable of anything, but in the context of his past.

The sense of dread while I was 'reading' it clung to me throughout the 3 weeks or so it took me to get through it (listening to the audio book during my commute!) in the way only very good or very affecting literature can, for me anyway - colouring everyday life in every possible way and making it impossible to return to a sense of normality until the story is resolved. Andrew Martin and what he might do to his wife and child hung over me like a heavy fog 24 hours a day.

I honestly, literally wasn't 100% sure he was really an alien until he dragged the body of the dead Vonnadorian across the lawn with Isobel watching. I suppose I only really trusted her viewpoint. I didn't even really trust Gulliver's viewpoint. I am not really sure why this is - perhaps it's a flaw?

I did really like the way Isobel and Gulliver were characterised and found it all entirely believable, including the way he describes falling in love with her, and how he describes realising he loved Gulliver. The exploration of love, in general, is very compelling and rings very true. Perhaps it is easy to write fiction that rings true when you are starting from a position from which, for your main character and first person narrator, everything is brand new, everything is a blank slate. You don't need to account for any back story, you just start and allow events, people and feelings to be born from nothing. It's perhaps a metaphor for writing, as well.

On that note the only bit of the book that had me literally groan out loud in irritation - the part where Andrew Martin muses about what it might be like if he were an unreliable narrator in a magical realist novel, and mentions other genres of novel he might be in. This self-referential-ness, or 'breaking the fourth wall' or whatever the literary equivalent of that is, totally rubbed me up the wrong way. The reference to an unreliable narrator is again something that made me doubt what I was supposed to believe about Andrew Martin, and I'm still not sure. Have I missed the point of the book entirely? I'm very willing to hear suggestions from you about what I might have missed, or whether the book is being more or less clever than I think it is.

By the way, I used the audio version of this, read by Mark Meadows, which was excellent but certainly the personality of the person reading will have an influence.

[Victoria]

PS I love that Gulliver is called Gulliver. *mentally composes A-level English essay question*

[Matthew]

I enjoyed the book very much and thought it was well written, but it didn’t have the same sort of emotional impact for me. I think the problem I had was not really the fault of the book, but more to do with me recently finishing Under the Skin off the back of the film. Both book and film were deeply, disturbingly alien and this literal and metaphoric alienation stayed with me for a long time afterwards. (The film especially. I never thought I would begin a sentence by saying “that scene where the crinkly man in the ooze popped…”)

Also, one of my all time favourites is The Wisdom of Crocodiles which features (amongst all sorts of other assorted weirdnesses) the head of the Fraud Secretariat being possessed by an alien economist who tries to explain the meaning of life. Three very different books but all with a similar starting premise, and for me The Humans suffered in comparison. Again, not the fault of the book. Where The Humans differs, and I think this is one of its strengths, is in its optimism. What it did very well was to dramatise the Carl Sagan quote “For small creatures such as we the vastness is bearable only through love.” Without a deft touch it could have easily have teetered into sentimentality, but Haig managed it and managed it well. Which makes me wonder if it’s easier to make a story feel profound through a bleak or cynical conclusion? Why does a happy ending (as much as The Humans can be described as having a happy ending) feel a bit light? Is it a human trait to dismiss happiness as something of a fantasy and general misery as more authentic? Or maybe it’s a me trait. Foolish human...

[Victoria]

Hmm. Thanks for three interesting book/film recommendations and a wonderful Carl Sagan quote I didn't know - rich pickings from one comment!

I wanted there to be a twist, and I admit I probably wanted a sad ending. My enjoyment, as I kind of said above, was based on that. What was the most compelling was my feeling that Andrew Martin was treading on extremely thin ice. Maybe it'd have been more compelling if there had been more suspicion, or if he'd been caught out over the amnesia more often.

When I watched the film Gravity, I was absolutely sure there was going to be an M. Night Shyalaman-style twist, so much so that I sat right through the credits in a final hope that the final message wasn't actually the final message. I think I thought it was going to be more like something like Solaris and I couldn't believe it was going to be completely "straight" just with a bit of hallucinated Clooney thrown in.

So in this light The Humans is disappointingly "straight". I will definitely look up your two suggestions for alienation books and films that do "straight" alien-among-us more cleverly.

But (perhaps representing my own point in life) I am so pleased for the man who wangles a happy ending for himself against the odds, that I am satisfied with that, although perhaps it isn't art. It is a vehicle for Haig to demonstrate that he is in a place where he has figured stuff out, albeit in a honest, flawed way, having made mistakes. Ultimate human wish fulfilment.

Do you think him deigning to give a list of advice to humans is arrogant? It's not a bad list; some of them are nearly platitudes of the "Sunscreen" variety, but some deserve deeper pondering. And again I rather liked the central conceit of an entity learning about people from a complete blank starting point, weird noses, clothes and all. I didn't feel jarred by him giving himself the right to advise us, after he had learnt, purely, which of 'our' values he thought were the most important.

As for happiness vs misery, well *my* favourite book is Villette, which is famous for its (spoiler...) ambiguous but really in fact desperately sad ending. Jane Eyre, on the other hand, is famous for having a contrived and rather unbelievable happy ending. It's an interesting question, why certain characters are not allowed to be happy and others can.

Villette is definitely a treatise about how happiness can not in fact be the meaning of life, at least not for some people, or at least that with a rich internal life and a few memories of true happiness and real love to treasure, material poverty and general suffering can be borne. In Jane Eyre, Bronte chickened out of fully making that conclusion but maybe she decided Lucy Snowe (Villette's heroine) was strong enough to bear that burden. Anyway, there we are talking about a different register of art than The Humans, which, though I did get large amounts of stuff from it, is not Great Art.

[Matthew]

I should fess up that the Sagan quote isn't one I knew but an epigraph to Part II of the book. They must have missed them out of the audio version. It did take me off on a tangent involving an episode of Battlestar Galactica, Blade Runner and now I feel the need to watch Contact again, so - all good!

I liked the list of advice for its contents (I’m a sucker for a motivational aphorism) but thinking about it has highlighted a feeling I had through a lot of the book, that the presence of the author was too strong for me to really believe in the story. The humour of the early sections, the self-referential unreliable narrator part you mentioned, the list of advice – a bit too much author and too little alien. That initial description of the book you posted -

“I am a nervous wreck about this one. I don’t really know why. Well, I do. Because it is personal. I put absolutely everything I had into it so if people don’t like it then they don’t like me, because all the best things I have to offer the world are inside its pages.”

- I wonder if it’s an author who is a bit too close to his material and can’t get out of the way of the story. The narration plays a part. The other two books I mentioned are both third person and I felt more easily the tangible oddness of alien life when viewed from the outside. Being addressed directly by a first person narrator did feel like an author posing as an alien. Maybe that was the intention?

I feel a bit mean picking at a book I rather liked (particularly if the author is a nervous wreck about it) but I suppose that’s what a book group is for!

[Victoria]

Yes I agree with all of this; very nicely observed.
I am reading (listening to) Fahrenheit 451 for the first time still and finding the prose amusingly overwritten, which is distracting. So it seems that good writing is by necessity unobtrusive. This is a sign that I will never be able to write fiction as my fiction prose is hopelessly self conscious.

Also, first person narration must be very hard to write. Villette which I waffle on about forever is masterfully done by giving you a confusing and distanced first person narrator who keeps herself hidden while painfully letting some profound things of herself show. So in short, every book should be like Villette.