Michel Faber - The Book of Strange New Things

It had felt odd to be told this, with such certitude, by a sage old-timer who wasn’t easily fooled. Peter’s co-existence with his fellow humans had not always been a happy one, after all. Could someone who’d behaved as badly as he did when he was in his teens and twenties — lying and breaking promises and stealing from any altruistic fool who gave him the benefit of the doubt — truly be said to love people? And yet the old pastor was well aware of his history. There were no secrets between shepherds.

Now, Peter was sitting cross-legged, dazzled by the light, half-delirious. Right in front of him, also cross-legged, sat a small boy — himself when eight or nine years old. He was a Cub Scout. He was proud and happy to be a Cub Scout, possessor of a green shirt and sewn-on badges and arcane knowledge about knots and tent pitching and the proper way to light a fire. He was looking forward to becoming a fully-fledged Scout soon, not just a Cub, so that he could learn archery and go hiking in the mountains and save the lives of strangers who had been buried under avalanches or bitten by snakes. As it turned out, he would never get to be a Scout — his family circumstances would soon become too awkward, and the Cubs membership would be cancelled and his uniform would sit neatly folded in the cupboard until finally the silverfish ruined it — but at eight he didn’t know that yet, and he was sitting cross-legged in his shorts and neckerchief, almost levitating with pleasure to be here amongst his wolf pack.

Sweat trickled from his brow into his eyes. He blinked and the blurry world sharpened into view. The child sitting before him was not himself at the age of eight. It was not even a child. It was Jesus Lover Seventeen, a creature unlike him in almost every imaginable way, except that she, or he, or it could sit cross-legged and clasp hands in prayer. Her robe was spinach-green, and so were her soft boots, albeit speckled with brown dirt. The sun, almost directly overhead, cast a shadow under her hood, swallowing her face in blackness.

‘What are you thinking, Jesus Lover Seventeen?’ he asked.

There was, as always, a pause. The Oasans were unaccustomed to thinking about thinking, or maybe they just found it difficult to translate their thoughts into English.

‘Before you came,’ said Jesus Lover Seventeen, ‘we were all alone and weak. Now, รี่ogether, we are สีรี่rong.’

There was something poignant about the fact that her tongue, or vocal cords, or whatever it was she spoke with, could manage the words ‘alone’ and ‘weak’ without much trouble, but that the words ‘together’ and ‘strong’ were almost impossible for her to utter. Her petite form made her look all the more vulnerable, but then everyone sitting round about her was petite and vulnerable-looking, too, with their thin arms and narrow shoulders and grubby mittens and booties. He might be ministering to a tribe of children and shrunken old people, a tribe that had lost all its full-sized men and women.

That wasn’t a fair view of them, of course; it was a failure to perceive their bodies as the norm, and his own as the aberration. He tried as hard as he could to adjust his vision, until the hundred-odd beings squatting before him grew to a mature scale, and he became a hulking monster.

‘The Book,’ suggested Jesus Lover One, from his preferred spot near the middle of the congregation. ‘Give word from the Book.’

‘The Book,’ several other voices agreed, relieved, perhaps, to be voicing two words that did not humiliate them.

Peter nodded, to signal he would comply. His Bible was always close to hand, shrouded in plastic wrapping inside his rucksack to keep the moisture out, and the Oasans would make noises of appreciation whenever he brought it to light. But oftentimes he didn’t even need to fetch it, because he had such an exceptional memory for Scripture. He looked inside his head now, and almost instantly found something appropriate, from Paul’s letter to the Ephesians. His brain was a weird organ, that’s for sure; sometimes he visualised it as a grubby cauliflower covered with scars and scorch-marks from the life he’d led, but at other times it seemed more like a spacious storehouse in which whatever verses he needed at any given moment were on display, already underlined.

‘ Now therefore ye are no more strangers and foreigners ,’ he quoted, ‘ but fellow citizens with the saints, and of the household of God; and are built upon the foundation of the apostles and prophets, Jesus Christ himself being the chief corner stone; in whom all the building fitly framed together groweth unto a holy temple in the Lord; in whom ye also are builded together for a habitation of God .’

A murmur of approval — satisfaction, even — emanated from the brightly dressed creatures sitting before him. The Bible verses were like a particularly mellow alcoholic drink that had been passed around. This was King James liquor — the real stuff. Oh, sure, the Oasans were grateful for the paraphrased booklets Peter had prepared for them. The pages were already much-thumbed, rippled with damp, and the words had been sung and recited often in these long, balmy days that he and his flock had spent together. And yet, Peter could tell that the booklets were not quite the solution he’d hoped they would be. They were referred to as ‘our Word-in-Hand’, a phrase which delighted him at first, until he realised that it served to differentiate the booklets from the genuine Book of Strange New Things. The hand-made pamphlets were seen as a local home-brew, a moonshine compromise, whereas the big King James, with its machine-tooled faux -leather cover and gold-embossed spine, was considered pure and definitive — the True Source.

Now, drinking in the verses from Ephesians , the Oasans were truly contented. Their hooded heads hung lower, casting all their faces into even deeper shadow. Their clasped hands moved gently in their laps, as though re-tracing, re-savouring, the rhythm of the rhetoric. Such subtle movements were their equivalent of a Southern Baptist congregation hollering ‘Hallelujah!’

Fond as he was of the King James, Peter was uneasy about the awe it inspired among his flock. It was just a translation, after all, with no greater claim to authenticity than many other translations. Jesus hadn’t expressed himself in Jacobean English, nor had Paul or the Old Testament prophets. Did the Oasans understand that? He doubted it. Which was a shame, because once it dawned on you that everyone who wasn’t a native speaker of Canaanite Hebrew, Koine Greek or Galilean Aramaic was at an equal disadvantage, you could relax and feel that Scripture in your own tongue was as good as Scripture in anyone else’s. Yet he thought he detected, in the Oasans, a sense of inferiority, which troubled him. He didn’t want to be like some old-fashioned imperialist missionary, poncing about like Moses in a safari suit, capitalising on a misconception that he was from the same tribe as Jesus and that God was an Englishman.

He’d considered gently disabusing the Oasans of their veneration of ‘the Book’, with an informative talk on the various languages that lay behind the seventeenth-century text, but decided that such a lecture would only make things more complicated, especially since the Oasans were very attached to key scriptures they’d learned in Kurtzberg’s time, and Kurtzberg had evidently been a King James fan. And no wonder. Any Christian preacher who loved language was bound to love the King James: you just couldn’t beat those cadences. So maybe, when dealing with these people, 100 %-proof Jacobean followed by a chaser in plain English was the way to go.

‘What Saint Paul is saying to his new friends,’ Peter explained, ‘is that once you’ve heard the word of God, it doesn’t matter how foreign you are, how far away you live. You become part of the community of Christians, all the Christians who’ve ever existed, including the ones who were alive when Jesus walked the earth. Then Paul goes on to compare us to a house. A house is built from many bricks or stones fitted together to make a big structure, and all of us are stones in the house that God is building.’