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Sep 2014
10:44am, 29 Sep 2014
2,740 posts
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LindsD
But he was a complete arse it seems (the real husband/dad) so that made sense to me.
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Sep 2014
10:44am, 29 Sep 2014
9,984 posts
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Oysterboy
(I really like the name Gulliver though and asked OH if we could put it on the baby names list. He said no)
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Sep 2014
10:54am, 29 Sep 2014
7,454 posts
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Diogenes
As I said above, I will resist the temptation to write an essay, and instead raise some points for discussion.
I read The Humans because of the large number of people on Twitter whose opinions I value recommending it. I also began to follow Matt Haig on there, and he was engaged and interesting. He also re-tweeted lots more praise from satisfied readers (of course he did), his publishers must be very pleased with him. Eventually this became quite tedious, especially when I found myself struggling to enjoy the book as much as I’d expected to. Therefore I wanted to find out what others thought about it.
So, what did I like about it, and what annoyed me?
I liked the premise and the themes. I thought the book had great heart, and I liked the attitude to mental health, and acceptance of others. I thought the best bits were about how doing simple things for others, giving them your time and attention, is what builds a bond and makes one feel loved. I found myself getting better in this way while I read the book.
I was disappointed that the author wasn’t brave enough or talented enough to push the concept of an alien arriving fresh to the planet further. There were too many inconsistencies – some things were odd to the Andrew Martin replacement , yet he seemed to possess innate knowledge in other areas.
The book is very simply written. This is not necessarily a bad thing, if the writing is interesting or surprising in its use of language, but this is not the case here. The message is that humans are basically good, and should be nicer to one another. This is very directly put, sometimes in a very trite way. Life is way more complex than this, and many other writers have conveyed this in a more challenging and satisfying way.
Of course, it is unfair to review a book by comparing it to others, but, when it comes to rating it, you have to apply some kind of relative ranking. If you want to read a book about aliens highlighting the ridiculousness of life of Earth, and a human trying to come to terms with life, the universe and everything, read Douglas Adams.
So, was Andrew Martin an alien replicant, or was he merely the product of his psychosis, as I have heard suggested? I prefer the former because, if the latter is true, then so much of the book is just Martin’s delusions, and he is a murderer, an idea that is given little consideration at all, except perhaps, where he has a fight with himself and kills the murderous version before burning his own hand to stop him being able to receive and transmit. But what does Gulliver witness, and what do they bury?
Finally, the list. I hated the list. This is a novel, not a self-help book. This seemed like a really lazy bit of writing. It was way too long, and contained repetition. This is something that should have been edited, either partially or in its entirety.
So, almost an essay, not quite a list. What do you think?
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Sep 2014
10:55am, 29 Sep 2014
4,676 posts
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Little Nemo - Shut up knee!
I gave it a 6, it was a book with a great idea that mainly worked. I like sci-fi writing so I think that might have made suspending my disbelief easier and I was able to go along with the story.
In some ways it was a bit of a cliché - a supposedly superior being is won over by love and becomes human but I think the writer was able to manage this change is an understandable way. The only flaw was that I was expecting there to be a crisis where he started to wonder if he was in fact a normal human having a breakdown but this never happened.
Oddly the bit that won me over was the prime numbers. I'm not a mathematician so I had a moment where I was wondering why an alien would like 97 because surely they would have different numbers as they wouldn't use Base 10. But then I realised that prime numbers are prime numbers in any system*, it's just the name that changes. This has never occurred to me before and I love it when a book makes me see the world in a different way like this.
I think I would have liked a bit more about where he come from and why they felt they had to destroy the information, that felt under developed.
I *loved* the dog!
* If they're not I'm going to feel incredibly stupid now!!!
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Sep 2014
10:59am, 29 Sep 2014
4,677 posts
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Little Nemo - Shut up knee!
Good point OB! Maybe it was because he persuaded the alien to say he had finished the mission? Although you'd think they might send someone to check...
Yep, some of the list was a bit trite Dio but I'm guessing that's because he had to get 97 items on it 
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Sep 2014
11:01am, 29 Sep 2014
18,039 posts
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HellsBells
one of my biggest problems was that although I don't read sci-fi now, I did as a teen and Heinlein's Stranger in a Strange land has really stayed with me. This book felt like a clumsy attempt to redo the alien fish out of water story and didn't come anywhere near Heinlein
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Sep 2014
11:05am, 29 Sep 2014
4,420 posts
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Dooogs
Didn't work for me, I'm afraid - it felt like a mash-up of several different attempts at writing the same novel (as OB alluded earlier) without editing it into a coherent novel. The list infuriated me for some reason - my immediate reaction was "Great, he's done a pastiche of Baz Luhrman's 'Suncreen' and now he's got to work out how to shoehorn it into his book".
Interestingly, it reminded me of an attempt to ape (no pun intended) a couple of other "suddenly horrified by humanity" novels of recent-ish years - particularly Will Self's 'Great Apes' and Christopher Hope's "Darkest England". Personally, I'd rather re-read either of those than go back to this...
(that said, I don't regret reading it - reading Bad Books always makes me appreciate the good ones more).
Rating: 4. Didn't vary much throughout the book, actually.
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Sep 2014
11:08am, 29 Sep 2014
14,954 posts
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fetcheveryone
Dio - I liked the fact that the alien was able to look at human relationships in a way that we often don't - so I agree that it was helpful to build that up as a series of alien observations.
As for the way in which he was perfectly familiar with some things and not with others - that's my 'Doctor Who' rule again. No book in human history can ever begin to imagine the potential similarities and differences between us humans and aliens from another planet. It's also possible that he'd studied the theory of human life from a distance, and in doing so, some things might seem incredibly important, whilst others would seem so commonplace to us as to be not even worth documenting. For example, how many random books from a shelf in a library would you have to read in order to discover the social conventions of wearing pants?
I don't go along with the idea of the alien being a product of his psychosis - I *like* it as a theory, and I've read similar before (Zen&...) - but if that had been the plot all along, I think maybe there should have been some sort of reveal along those lines.
Enjoying all the points of view
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Sep 2014
11:08am, 29 Sep 2014
7,455 posts
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Diogenes
2 other points. One of the quotes on the cover is "hilarious" - I know that that's publishers licence to lift one word from a review, but it's not hilarious at all, mildly amusing at best.
I love Talking Heads, and This Must Be The Place is on of my favourites. I gave it 5 initially, but then upped it to 6.
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Sep 2014
11:11am, 29 Sep 2014
4,421 posts
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Dooogs
PS OB - throw any unwanted but cool baby names this way. 12 weeks to go and we need an ususual boy's name urgently...
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