The Humans is the funniest novel Matt Haig has written and also the saddest, and those turn out to be the same pages. It opens with a naked man walking down a road outside Cambridge, baffled by the concept of clothes, and it finishes somewhere I did not expect a book with that opening to reach. The naked man is not Professor Andrew Martin, though he is wearing him. Andrew, a Cambridge mathematician, has just proved the Riemann hypothesis, which turns out to be a problem for the wider universe, so something from a very tidy planet has been sent to erase the proof and everyone who has seen it. The narrator is that something. He finds our faces upsetting. He finds our noses genuinely offensive. He cannot work out why a species that dies would spend its short allotment on jobs and weather.
That flat, declarative narrating voice is where some readers bounce, and I think they bounce off the wrong thing. Yes, the sentences say exactly what they mean with no shading. That is the character. He is a creature of pure mathematics learning idiom in real time, and Haig holds the register steady for three hundred pages, which is much harder than it looks. It also powers the comedy, because deadpan literalism is the oldest reliable engine there is. The alien's first encounter with peanut butter is a small masterpiece. So is his slow surrender to Emily Dickinson, his considered verdict on the Beach Boys, and his standoff with the family dog, the only creature on Earth who clocks him immediately.
Then Haig turns the book. The mission keeps the narrator close to Andrew's wife Isobel and Andrew's sixteen-year-old son Gulliver, and Gulliver is not doing well. Bullied, exhausted, seriously considering leaving. What follows is the most direct writing in the novel and the reason people keep pressing it on their friends. Haig wrote this in the years after his own breakdown, and the specificity shows: the book understands that despair is rarely dramatic, that it is mostly tiredness plus arithmetic. The list of advice the narrator eventually leaves for Gulliver has been photographed and taped inside lockers for a decade. Read in context, at the end of everything the two of them go through, I understand why.
The mission is the weakest thing here. As a thriller the plot is thin, the deadline is elastic, and there is a stretch past the midpoint where the narrator drifts around being charmed while nothing much presses on him. Readers who call that section long are not wrong. Haig also cannot always resist an aphorism, and a few land with the buffed finish of a line written to be quoted rather than a line a character would say. Neither problem sinks the book, because the emotional line under it never slackens.
Why you should read
- Great if A Man Called Ove's grumpy outsider worked on you
- Comic novels that turn serious without warning
- Deadpan first-person voices carried all the way through
- The Midnight Library's hope, considerably funnier
What to expect
- Flat, literal narration that is a deliberate character choice
- A thin thriller plot under a very strong voice
- About 320 pages, fast once the voice clicks
- A frank thread about suicide and depression
The scene I keep returning to is domestic. The alien is standing in a kitchen holding a wine glass he does not know how to hold, working out that a species this badly designed somehow produced Isobel Martin, and deciding that this fact alone justifies the entire ruined evening. He came to end a proof. He stayed for a dog, a boy, and a woman who had spent years forgiving a man who did not deserve it.
