Alienation effect

‘To give you an idea of the way people here consume stories, I have put this book together as a human would’ writes the alien narrator of Matt Haig’s novel The Humans. Professor Andrew Martin is not Professor Andrew Martin at all, but rather a Vonnedorian sent to destroy all evidence on Earth that Martin has solved the Riemann Hypothesis. This mathematical breakthrough, think the Vonnedorians, would lead to technological advances not safe in the hands of the violent and primitive humans. They must be stopped. Martin is murdered and his laptop destroyed. His wife, Isobel, and son, Gulliver, must also be killed; but perhaps a little predictably, what happens instead is that our alien begins to fall in love.

The greatest danger to this novel is its narrator. Imposter Andrew Martin is not accustomed to Earth. Everything is new for him, so we’re subjected to what Lyn Hejinian might call ‘the defamiliarization techniques with which we are so familiar’.