Michel faber under the skin review5/21/2023 ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() He’s right: There’s very little about Book that you could call wacky. “If I’d written a work of literary fiction that was as wacky as the Lee/Kirby stories, then there would be very few grown-ups who could groove to that, because the comics were for children.” “We become less credulous as we become older,” he says. But when asked why all the wonder in the book seems so banal from Peter’s perspective, Faber responds in the cheerful-but-blunt manner of someone who spends a lot of time living away from people. In brief, it sounds like a generic science-fiction novel: A missionary named Peter travels to a planet called Oasis to bring the word of God to an inscrutable race of aliens.įaber offers a clue in the acknowledgements to one of the book’s big mysteries by expressing his “appreciation for the team of writers, pencilers, and inkers who worked at Marvel Comics during the 1960s and 1970s, giving me such enjoyment as a child and ever since.” In an interview at the Sorrento Hotel’s Fireside Room, Faber happily elaborates on his homage, identifying characters’ names - “Stanko is Steranko” - and explaining that he wanted to write a book that produced the sense of wonder and possibility he felt as a comics reader. Like Faber’s debut novel, Under the Skin, Book is a genre-twisting story told in a spare, dispassionate style. This is a book of secrets, only some of which are eventually revealed on the page. You can feel a subconscious life seething beneath the narrative in Michel Faber’s The Book of Strange New Things. ![]()
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