The Humans – Matt Haig
The theme of the outsider is a common one in literature, and one Matt Haig has explored in 2011 in The Radleys, a suburban family hiding a shadowy secret which would see them chased from their homes by neighbours carrying fiery torches should they be discovered, but they at least could call Earth their homeworld. Not so for the alien intelligence which has disposed of a Cambridge mathematician who has just solved the Riemann hypothesis, taken his form, and must now remove all evidence of the research which is deemed to powerful to be in the possession of such a dangerous and aggressive species.
An alien mind in a human body examining society, psychology and relationships and while questioning the lies necessary to keep all afloat was most famously described in Stranger in a Strange Land, though The Humans is a more reserved work than that revolutionary tome. Whereas Robert A Heinlein was an American writing an epic blockbuster (some would say bonkbuster), Haig is terribly British (“This was England, a part of Earth where thinking about the weather was the chief human activity”) and even as he makes clear the hypocrisy of the masks which civilisation requires we savages to wear on a daily basis, he does so with dry humour and tact.
Rather than becoming leader of a global cult, the imposter Professor Andrew Martin eats peanut butter sandwiches, walks the dog as an excuse to get out of the house, delivers impromptu lectures on the Drake equation, takes delight in losing at football (less pressure than winning) and discovers an unexpected fondness for jazz and the classics, as in Beethoven, Brahms, Bernstein, Beatles and Bowie. Primarily mathematical, music is an previously unknown delight to him and more understandable than the short sighted focus of the news which he dubs The War and Money Show.
More unsettling for Andrew is the realisation that once he has overcome the initial horror of his wife Isobel, he begins to warm to her, actually looking forward to her presence in domestic situations, though the behaviour of his teenage son remains a mystery to him, a problem compounded by a lack of memory of the majority of their relationship. Blundering through wrong assumptions about a past he has never experienced, his developing relationship with his newfound family is looked on as an aberration by his superiors and contrary to his purpose; if they have any knowledge that could lead to the Riemann solution, Andrew will have to eliminate them.
It’s no accident that the son is called Gulliver; like the travels of Swift’s eponymous hero, the narrative of our alien host is driven by the insanity of the world we have created, the dogma of conformity and unsustainability, where abstract concepts such as money are valued over tangibles such as health and the environment, where industries such as beauty magazines serve the sole purpose of making their readers feel ugly so as to coerce them to spend more to make themselves feel better.
While an obvious science fiction reference is Invasion of the Body Snatchers as it is during sleep when Andrew can most easily compel humans to action and it is during his own rest when the personality he has adopted fills him with doubts and nightmares, the setup is actually more akin to the 1958 film I Married a Monster from Outer Space. There the eponymous alien assumed the identity of an unfortunate groom on his wedding night but found himself first conflicted then overwhelmed by the presence of the very species he was sent to infiltrate, becoming more human than human and ultimately sacrificing himself to save his bride.
There are also echoes of Kurt Vonnegut’s legendary Slaughterhouse-Five beyond an admittedly unreliable narrator who is controlled against his will by a force as distant and obscure as the Tralfamadorians. As Vonnegut’s fantastical rewriting of the horror of the Dresden bombings had autobiographical aspects, so does Haig’s observation of the insanity of modern life reflect his own struggles with mental health, describing how those who suffer are misunderstood, ostracised and mocked rather than being offered compassion and support: “Humans don’t like mad people unless they are good at painting, and only then once they are dead.”
It is telling that throughout the novel, the physical description of all the characters is minimal, leaving them anonymous; whether an alien or a human in need of help, they look the same and could be anyone, a friend, a neighbour, a lover.
The Humans is now available from Canongate Books
Please follow the link for our interview with Matt Haig
