The Humans by Matt Haig: Alien Entity Ruled by Logic Thrown into the Human Experience

Don’t be misled by the blurb, this unusual tale is not science fiction, but poses the question of being human. An alien known as a Vonnagon invades the body of brilliant mathematician Andrew Martin to avert the spread of his breakthrough in the Riemann Hypothesis.

Buy from Amazon

This solution to the puzzle of how prime numbers are sequenced could be disastrous for the alien race as well as the Cosmos as a whole. So the alien has been assigned to kill anyone who knows the answer.

What it Feels Like to be Human

But really, this is a novel about what it feels like to be human from an alien perspective. The alien, (now known as Andrew) starts to feel what humans feel as he gets to know Andrew’s family. This is an unusual and sensitively written book on how an advanced alien as this Vonnagon could be caught in a paradox of logic and being human.

The narrative style is at times stilted, like that written by an adolescent boy. I imagined Andrew to be like Data from Star Trek that has been pushed into a human body. For him, the experience is overwhelming and confusing and articulation of this experience is difficult. Hormones, food cravings, mortality and hangovers cannot cohabit logic. The only way to resolve everything is to read poetry and to love.

Advice for a Human

The opening scene describes Andrew’s first experience of earth as he walks naked down a street. People think this brilliant mathematician has simply suffered a mental breakdown. When spat at for the offence of public nakedness, Andrew spits back, thinking this is an earth greeting. Andrew also gets disastrously wrong infidelity and teenage suicide, but also right in a naive way.

The chapter ‘Advice for a Human’ is worth reading twice for these almost childish points. They would seem obvious, only they aren’t when living continuously within the human organism. Living in human skin is like not seeing the wood for the trees.