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Book Review: ‘The Humans’ by Matt Haig

Title: The Humans

Author: Matt Haig

Publisher: Canongate Books

Publication Date: 2013

WARNING: This story deals with issues of suicide .

I previously read and really enjoyed The Midnight Library by Matt Haig. Haig has an engaging storytelling style and I was curious to try one of his earlier books: The Humans .

The novel centres on an alien who has taken the place of mathematician Professor Andrew Martin on the evening he answered the Riemann hypothesis. If it solution was revealed it would change the evolutionary progress of the human race. An interfering alien race don’t believe Earth is ready for this knowledge and dispatches their agent to eliminate anyone the real Andrew Martin told about his discovery. What follows is a philosophical and psychological analysis of humanity as the alien is, at first, disgusted by humans only to find himself slowly becoming fascinated with our way of life.

Every book needs a strong opening to get its readers hooked. The novel’s opening sentence: ‘I know that some of you reading this are convinced humans are a myth, but I am here to state that they do actually exist’, was immediately enticing and its tone set an expectation for the rest of the story. Straightaway I was hopeful that this was a book I would enjoy.

The first half The Humans starts strongly as we follow the alien struggling to pass as a regular person. We watch him be confounded by the concept of wearing clothes, have to fake conversations both with and about people he has never heard of, and be horrified by every type of food he encounters (to name just a few). The observations he makes and the multiple incorrect conclusions he arrives at are what makes this part of the story entertaining.

The tone of the novel shifts in the second half when the alien realises he has become captivated by humanity and all the experiences it provides. In this more serious half we see the alien counsel the real Andrew Martin’s son Gulliver after a suicide attempt and encourages Martin’s wife Isobel to pursue her dreams of writing and to focus on herself beyond her roles as a wife and mother.

Although I really liked The Humans I didn’t enjoy it quite as much as I did The Midnight Library . Library’s plot is constantly shifting and adapting as its protagonist visits different realities. In contrast the plot of Humans evolves gradually as the alien’s outlook changes. Although this change in attitude felt natural, for me a downside of the book was that the story’s inciting incident (the alien adjusting to life on Earth) lost its magic as the story went on.

In what seems to be a trend in Haig’s novels, The Humans features a deep, heartfelt message at its core about the importance of being your own person, not being afraid of failure, and living your life as the best possible version of yourself. All of this is summed up at the novel’s conclusion in the alien’s letter to Gulliver which is filled with genuine sentiment and ultimately acts as Haig’s message to his readers.

If anyone is curious about The Humans like I was I would certainly recommend giving it a go. At around 300 pages the novel’s brief chapters make it a quick read. The tone of the book does quickly shift from comedic to heart-breaking to macabre so be prepared before you step onto this rollercoaster look at humanity.

If you enjoyed this review you may also like these reviews:

Book Review: ‘The Midnight Library’

Book Review: ‘The Man Without Shelter’

Book Review: ‘172 Hours on the Moon’

The Midnight Library

How to Stop Time
Reasons to Stay Alive
World Book Night
The Humans: An Extract

The Humans: Reviews

The Humans: Video
Humans: An A-Z
The Radleys: International
The Radleys Reviews
The Radleys First Few Pages
The Radleys: Reading Group Guide
The Last Family in England: Reviews
The Last Family in England: First Few Pages
The Last Family in England: Deleted Chapters 1
The Last Family in England: Deleted Chapters 2
The Last Family in England: Deleted Chapters 3
The Last family in England: Deleted Pages 4
The Last Family in England: Deleted Pages 5
The Last Family in England: Authors Commentary
The Dead Fathers Club: Reviews
The Dead Fathers Club: Audio Interview
The Dead Fathers Club: Reading Guide
The Dead Fathers Club: FAQ
The Possession of Mr Cave: Reviews
The Possession of Mr Cave: First Few Pages
Evie and the Animals
A Boy Called Christmas
The Girl Who Saved Christmas
Father Christmas and Me
To Be A Cat: Reviews
To Be A Cat: First Few Pages
Shadow Forest: Reviews
The Runaway Troll: Reviews
The Runaway Troll: First Few Pages
The Runaway Troll: Character List
International

The Humans is a laugh-and-cry book. Troubling, thrilling, puzzling, believable and impossible. Matt Haig uses words like a tin-opener. We are the tin. Jeanette Winterson

A brilliant exploration of what it is to love, and to be human, The Humans is both heartwarming and hilarious, weird, and utterly wonderful. One of the best books I’ve read in a very long time. S J Watson

Utterly wonderful. Mark Billingham

The Humans is tremendous; a kind of Curious Incident meets The Man Who Fell to Earth . It’s funny, touching and written in a highly appealing voice. Joanne Harris Matt Haig’s hilarious novel puts our species on the spot. Guardian

Haig strikes exactly the right tone of bemusement, discovery, and wonder in creating what is ultimately a sweet-spirited celebration of humanity and the trials and triumphs of being human. The result is a thought-provoking, compulsively readable delight. Starred Review, Booklist

A wonderfully funny, gripping and inventive novel. Like Kurt Vonnegut and Audrey Niffenegger, Haig uses the tropes of science fiction to explore and satirise concepts of free will, love, marriage, logic, immortality and mercy with elegance and poignancy. The Times

Extraordinary The Independent

Excellent . . . very human and touching indeed. Patrick Ness

Haig’s unexpectedly raw tale of love, belonging, and peanut butter… It’s funny, clever and quite, quite lovely. Sam Baker, The Sunday Times

Astute, drolly hilarious and occasionally beautiful, full of poignant and painful insight into what it is to be human. Jay Richardson The List

May this book remain in our libraries as a stark warning on the frailty and art of being human. Edelweiss

This is a tender, funny novel about the often irrational ways humans behave, written in accessible prose, and invites comparison with Mark Haddon and Patrick Ness. The Independent on Sunday

A novel with an enormous heart, infused with a sense of gratitude for everything that makes us who we are. The Daily Express

From the alien’s naked (but unembarrassed) entry to our planet right through to the end, where he understands us better than we understand ourselves, this warm-hearted novel never misses a beat. Scotland on Sunday

The Humans is one of those rare books that makes your heart swell and your eyes tear up as Haig reintroduces us to the human race, with its social quirks, hidden meanings and, of course, peanut butter sandwiches. Stylist

The alien’s inability to conform to society’s conventions leads to some hilariously chaotic scenes. SFX magazine

Haig’s latest novel, The Humans, is a simple yet moving story that will have you weeping at the beauty and futility of it all. Catching the Comet’s Tail, The Huffington Post

This is a book I can see myself returning to again and again. I love it! Curiosity Killed The Bookworm

I t’s hard to describe just how good The Humans is. It’s a book that has something for everybody. After all, it’s about all of us. Funny and life affirming, it’s one of those rarest of books; a feel good read that will stay with you long after reading. Read it, share it, live it. Robin’s Books

Witty and insightful and brilliantly written in a way that makes it easy to love. Liz Loves Books

The Humans is a romantic look at people, at what builds us and what we have achieved. This can be seen in the wistful glances of poetry and music. If you took out all of the narrative aspects, The Humans could be seen as a collection of essays from a man pondering his own existence. Thank you Matt, for this map you have drawn for me and many others. Utter Biblio

The Humans is full of such lovely, grandiose statements about humankind. Matt Haig is not afraid of a sweeping generalisation any more than he is afraid of peculiar specifics… But this bravado is what makes the book work. If it had been written by a less mature, less confident writer it could have been a disaster. Thankfully, it’s not a disaster – it is a finely-tuned balancing act of humour and sincerity. Writers’ Hub

My praise for this book is never-ending – I genuinely haven’t loved a book as much as I love this one, in a very long time – and I’m sure that it will stay with me for a very long time to come. This is a book that I think everyone – regardless of your preferred genres – should pick up and read. It will have you laughing, give you goosebumps, make you gasp, bring a tear to your eye, and warm you from the inside out. This is, in my opinion, a perfect masterpiece. Pen to Paper

THE SUNDAY TIMES and NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER

Sunday Times

"An uplifting, poignant novel about regret, hope and second chances" David Nicholls

"Amazing and utterly beautiful, The Midnight Library is everything you'd expect from the genius storyteller who is Matt Haig" Joanna Cannon

"Love this man's books"

Jodi Picoult

"The king of empathy" Jameela Jamil

Jenny Colgan

"Haig is one of the most inspirational popular writers on mental health of our age and, in his latest novel, he has taken a clever, engaging concept and created a heart-warming story that offers wisdom in the same deceptively simple way as Mitch Albom's best tales"

Independent

The Midnight Library is out now in the UK and America.

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Review: The Humans, By Matt Haig

A vonnadorian assassin's guide to planet earth, subscribe to independent premium to bookmark this article.

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Mission impossible: the lone alien soon finds himself warming to the humans he has been sent to kill

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Matt Haig's new novel, his fifth for adults, is a wryly humorous look at the human condition as seen by an alien. The narrator comes from the planet Vonnadoria, where life is based around maths, logic and rationality, with no messy emotions to clutter up the immortal existence. So far, so Mr Spock, but the interest comes from the narrator's mission. A professor of maths at Cambridge University, Andrew Martin, has solved the Riemann hypothesis, a real mathematical conundrum involving prime numbers. Vonnadorians believe that this holds the key to space travel, so the narrator's job is to exterminate Martin and anyone to whom he has divulged his discovery.

At the beginning, Martin has been killed, and the alien is inhabiting his body. The fun starts immediately: while the alien can absorb vast amounts of theoretical knowledge about humans, their illogical customs are harder to learn.

Of course the plot is allegory for how our highly technological but often inhumane culture, with its inherent paradoxes, seems to an outsider. The themes are sometimes obvious if heartfelt: "They can drive a car 30 miles every day and feel good about themselves for recycling a couple of empty jam jars. They can talk about peace being a good thing yet glorify war." But they are often wise: the facades humans use, like avoiding talking about the issues they want to discuss; or the masks of social politesse, or their intolerance of difference: "Maybe this was another human trait. Their ability to turn on themselves, to ostracise their own kind."

Haig, who has written eloquently about his own experience of depression, and who mentions his period of suffering panic attacks in an afterword, is sensitive on the way that a supposedly advanced species treats its mentally ill ("sadness seemed to me like a disease, and I worried it was contagious"), and on shortcomings of medicine such as the absolute separation of illness of body and mind. There are sharp gems: "Humans ... don't like mad people unless they are good at painting, and only then once they are dead." And droll observations on other topics abound.

The alien starts off determined to carry out his commands, but finds himself falling for some of these beings, despite – or perhaps because of – their foibles. In particular, he finds ways of avoiding his orders to kill Professor Martin's beautiful but beleaguered wife and her troubled son. This process allows Haig to explore emotions and the risk of vulnerability and pain that they bring.

There are a few blunders. The alien mentions the presence of hydrogen in air as a constant, but air doesn't contain pure hydrogen. Water vapour contains hydrogen, but as part of a different molecule. The alien is also flummoxed by metaphors, but in between being bewildered by "big fish in academic circles" and "right as rain", he himself uses a metaphor: "My task was going to be easy ... the meat of it", and later reads "between the lines".

Cynics may consider some of the listed advice given by the alien to Professor Martin's son to be homilies. But that is missing the point. This is a tender, funny novel about the often irrational ways humans behave, written in accessible prose, and invites comparison with Mark Haddon and Patrick Ness.

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Book Summary and Reviews of The Humans by Matt Haig

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by Matt Haig

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Genre: Literary Fiction
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"I know that some of you reading this are convinced humans are a myth, but I am here to state that they do actually exist. For those that don't know, a human is a real bipedal life form of midrange intelligence, living a largely deluded existence on a small waterlogged planet in a very lonely corner of the universe." The bestselling, award-winning author of The Radleys is back with what may be his best, funniest, and most devastating dark comedy yet. When an extraterrestrial visitor arrives on Earth, his first impressions of the human species are less than positive. Taking the form of Professor Andrew Martin, a prominent mathematician at Cambridge University, the visitor is eager to complete the gruesome task assigned him and hurry back home to the utopian world of his own planet, where everyone enjoys immortality and infinite knowledge. He is disgusted by the way humans look, what they eat, their capacity for murder and war, and is equally baffled by the concepts of love and family. But as time goes on, he starts to realize there may be more to this weird species than he has been led to believe. Disguised as Martin, he drinks wine, reads poetry, develops an ear for rock music and a taste for peanut butter. Slowly, unexpectedly, he forges bonds with Martin's family, and in picking up the pieces of the professor's shattered personal life, he begins to see hope and beauty in the humans' imperfections and begins to question the mission that brought him there. Praised by the New York Times as a "novelist of great seriousness and talent," author Matt Haig delivers an unlikely story about human nature and the joy found in the messiness of life on Earth. The Humans is a funny, compulsively readable tale that playfully and movingly explores the ultimate subject - ourselves.

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"Starred Review. While at times the novel is sentimental, the wonder and humor with which the protagonist approaches life, and the many emotions and discoveries he experiences, are worth getting a bit weepy over." - Publishers Weekly "Starred Review. The protagonist's genuine joy in discovering the good things the unstable human race has produced - peanut butter, Emily Dickinson, Australian wine, the Beach Boys, dogs, and love, to name a few - is contagious. Readers of all stripes will find the results quick-paced, touching, and hilarious." - Library Journal "A saccharine novel." - Kirkus "A brilliant exploration of what it is to love, and to be human, The Humans is both heartwarming and hilarious, weird, and utterly wonderful. One of the best books I've read in a very long time." - S.J. Watson New York Times bestselling author of Before I go to Sleep " The Humans is tremendous; a kind of Curious Incident meets The Man Who Fell to Earth . It's funny, touching and written in a highly appealing voice." - Joanne Harris, award-winning author of Chocolat

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Matt Haig Author Biography

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Matt Haig is the number one bestselling author of Reasons to Stay Alive , Notes on a Nervous Planet and six highly acclaimed novels for adults, including How to Stop Time , The Humans and The Radleys . His latest novel is The Midnight Library and the audiobook edition is read by Carey Mulligan. Haig also writes award-winning books for children, including A Boy Called Christmas , which is being made into a feature film with an all-star cast. He has sold more than a million books in the UK and his work has been translated into over forty languages.

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Review of The Humans by Matt Haig

by Matt Haig

Spoiler alert! This review reveals significant plot details.

Matt Haig surprised me with the unexpectedly sweet How to Stop Time . So, of course when I learned he has a novel involving a mathematician who might have proved the Reimann Hypothesis, well … I just had to read it! The alien as fish-out-of-water is a tried-and-true trope of science fiction these days, allowing authors to comment on how wacky some human social and cultural conventions would seem to a true outsider. Haig seizes upon this as the central conceit of The Humans and takes it even further. What begins as seemingly benign documentation of human quirks soon turns into a life-or-death mission to eliminate any evidence that Andrew Martin has proved the Reimann Hypothesis. Because apparently the rest of the universe isn’t interested in sharing existence with humans just yet.

I’m torn on The Humans . On one level it’s a cobbled-together mess of unoriginal ideas, stylistic homages, and trite philosophy packaged into a “aren’t humans weird” cavalcade of scenes and sequels. On another level, Haig makes some interesting choices that make the novel tug on my heartstrings despite its unoriginality. The philosophical depth of the novel isn’t much, but it is there , which is more than one might say for some novels. And, of course, I’m a bit partial to the notion that a better understanding of fundamental mathematical theory is what unlocks our ability to transcend our physical existence and manipulate matter and space-time in a fundamentally new way.

Our narrator and protagonist never tells us their real name because they didn’t have one before coming to Earth. The Vonnadorians have some kind of gestalt hive-mind existence, a polity of individual consciousnesses nevertheless united towards a singular purpose. Thus, the being who takes over Andrew Martin’s life and is exposed to the brutalist individualism of human existence inevitably becomes “corrupted” by humanity, as always seems to happen in these cases. Their quest to eliminate anyone who might possibly have learned that Andrew Martin solved the hypothesis eventually gives way to a quest to survive and protect those closest to them, their adopted wife and child, from their superiors and any proxies sent by them. Yet their misunderstanding of human culture means that it isn’t as simple as taking over Andrew Martin’s life and carrying on as if nothing else were wrong. For one, Andrew Martin, it turns out, was a massive dick.

That’s one of those interesting choices I referred to above. It would be one thing if our alien protagonist took over the life of a sympathetic character. Is it “more ok” that they supplanted a “bad” guy? It certainly creates more friction and conflict between our narrator and their wife, Isobel, and son, Gulliver. One of the more rewarding aspects of the novel is watching their attempts to reconcile Andrew Martin with Isobel and Gulliver, which baffles those two to no end.

The Humans has a very Kurt Vonnegut feel to it. (I’m assuming the name “Vonnadoria” is a homage to him/the Tralfalmadorians of Slaughterhouse-Five .) Haig wrestles with much the same motifs and themes that Vonnegut explores throughout his oeuvre—namely, the point of human existence in a vast and uncaring block-time universe, and why we bother having emotional connections with other individuals when we know that these will inevitably end and quite probably hurt us in the process. This time it’s an alien experiencing this ennui rather than a human unstuck from time, but the parallels are striking. I don’t know. I liked it but I also didn’t—it definitely made me want to read more Vonnegut, but again, is there anything happening here I haven't seen before?

The whole mathematics motif was also a dud for me. So Andrew Martin made a huge discovery about prime numbers that might have caused the human species to jump way ahead in terms of technological development—and the Vonnadorians don’t want that, so they’re cheating and suppressing that knowledge in an efficient, surgical way. I mean, I guess it’s better than just destroying our whole planet! Nevertheless, as a mathematically-inclined person, I wish the mathematical aspects were more in the foreground of the story. It’s basically a plot device—and there really isn’t anything wrong with that—and as such doesn’t do anything extra for me.

The Humans has its touching moments of, well, human connection that made me like Haig’s How to Stop Time so much. Our protagonist bonds with a dog. Our protagonist has a genuine conversation with Andrew Martin’s son, which is more than many fathers of teenagers will ever experience. Our protagonist comes to understand how pain and suffering is just as much an essential component of the human experience as pleasure or intellectual pursuits.

All that being said, it just didn’t wow me. It didn’t enthrall me. There was too much about the writing, about the way Haig deploys the fish-out-of-water humour like an area-denial tactic … the novel comes on very strong, and so it kind of has to win you over or fall flat. It did the latter for me.