The Humans: A Novel
By: Matt Haig / Narrated By: Mark Meadows
Length: 8 hrs and 11 mins
Beautiful. That’s all… Just beautiful.
When I was first learning astrology, I had one teacher explain Neptune and its placement in the chart thus: It’s what makes the difference between one person hearing beautiful violin music and another hearing sawing on catgut strings.
The Humans by Matt Haig is a grand exploration of this idea, and I found it captivating.
Humanity just can’t handle truth, success, advancement. Therefore, when a mathematician at Cambridge solves the unsolvable, thereby posssssibly leading Humankind forward, a race of aliens is on edge. One alien is sent to Earth to become the Professor, Andrew Martin, find and destroy all evidence of the man’s results, and wipe out anyone he may’ve even whispered about it all to. This means Martin’s friends will have to be wiped out, if he breathed a word/crowed to them, and most CERtainly Martin’s wife and son will have to be erased.
The alien shows up on Earth unclothed, penniless, and clueless. Somehow he makes it back to Martin’s home (After going viral on YouTube) and tries eeeeeasing his way forward, getting all done swiftly and efficiently. The family dog, however, knows the alien ain’t no human, and while everyone else kinda passes off the alien’s oddities as “Andrew Martin has been working too hard and is burned out”, he at least growls and is standoffish.
But the dog Newton isn’t the only one who’s unhappy to see this Martin/alien. Apparently, Martin’s work was more important to him than his family, and he has an unhappy wife, a miserable teenaged son, and inCREdibly poor taste in music. One of the beginning’s strengths is that Haig’s writing is all over the place, and we the readers/listeners are hit with info just as Martin/the alien is. Clothes? Whazza? And whyyyy?
Wife looking at me funny? Whazza? whyyyy? Son who screams at me then stomps off and slams door? Whazza? whyyyy? And husky woman’s voice over the phone? Whooo?
The alien does some despicable things with his extraterrestrial powers like “smothering” a fellow mathematician to death, wondering why the man’s wife is distraught. Tears? What for? What is this love? To an alien who comes from a perfect society where there’s no such messiness, just pure and simple perpetual musings of the sublimity of math, really: Love is all these humans can come up with?
Just so messy.
And nothing messier than a son who ponders railroad tracks, waaaay toooo closely. Or same son swallowing a bottleful of meds then going out on the roof to teeter precariously on the edge. Was all this Andrew Martin’s fault? And why does the alien wish to understand? What’s it mean to him anyway? Why will he try to save what he must soon murder/erase?
I was kinda sorta afraid this all was going to come off as so much preachiness, as just a trifle too obvious. The whole: Humans as viewed from outside, and aren’t our desperate, messy, wonderful lives so worth living? And Haig would be preaching to this choir as it certainly takes one to know one. Like Haig, I’ve lost years to clinical depression, to sitting in a chair, surviving not one day at a time but one second screaming into the next. To get over depression is one thing, one HUGE thing, but to know it’s always lurking? Friend, you’ve gotta find a point to life, a beauty to it somewhere. Otherwise, it’s just too easy to cash all your chips in and go Home.
Haig does it sooo beautifully. Because Andrew Martin made a mess of things, and nothing is easy. And the alien thinks he’s getting a handle on it all, and he messes it all up just as foully. Nope, never ever ever is ANY of it easy.
It’s just that it’s worth it.
Whether it’s bonding with a dog over peanut butter, or it’s sitting with a drunk and wanting to heal his gimpy leg. Or it’s the odd and plain features of The Wife turning into the singular impossibility of all the randomness of the Universe creating this beautiful and beloved creature, here, now, within a finger’s reach. Or it’s a list of all the things a flailing young man might need to know as he navigates Life, words to remember, words to live by.
Or it’s an alien who has sorely screwed it all up and is now so lonely. But who finds that a sunset is no longer light being refracted or filtered or gases or any such thing. No, it’s just a thing of beauty, something to be shared with someone else.
I’ve come to love Mark Meadows as a narrator as he has the perfect blend of warmth and humor in his voice. He can juggle an alien’s murderous intent with budding confusion, and Meadows makes an alien copping to having sex with a young co-ed earlier that day at once hilarious and desperately sad at the same time. I was glad to see he was the narrator here, and I was vaaaaastly beYONd satisfied when all was said and done.
We’re left to create our own ending to The Humans, but hey, if we’ve hit this point in our lives and we don’t know how to do that? Shame on us, and sit down and listen to this again, why doncha? Here is as lovely a handbook on being human as ever there was. We’re all the same.
Aliens, humans. We all just need reasons to get up in the morning, to choose smiling whenever possible, joy wherever we can create it. After all, we’ve all got Neptune in our charts somewhere…
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