![]() On a narrative level, The Book of Strange New Things has most in common with Faber’s adroitly unified novellas. The narration is more restrained and focused than in Faber’s epic bestseller, The Crimson Petal and the White, partly because he employs a single focaliser (his other large novels are multifocal), and partly because the bizarre content of the book requires a consistent point of view to render it coherent and credible. It features well-realised characters and delicately carved sentences. True to form, The Book of Strange New Things is immersive, lightly surrealist and carefully plotted. Generally speaking, if he doesn’t pull off this or that effect, it is because he hasn’t attempted it. There are, to my mind, almost no markers of expressive or structural failure in Faber’s oeuvre. From the lingering strangeness of Under the Skin (2000) to the Dickensian energy of The Crimson Petal and the White (2002), and even in modest texts, such as The Hundred and Ninety-Nine Steps (2001), The Courage Consort (2002) and his excellent farce The Fire Gospel (2008), Faber’s narrative technique seems perfectly matched to the originating conceit – at times uncannily so. ![]() Michel Faber writes like a practiced musical soloist, striving to produce the exact effect demanded by the score – no more, no less – irrespective of genre, scale or mood. ![]()
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