Book Review
Title: The Humans by Matt Haig
Genre: Sci-Fi
Rating: 4 Stars
I have read The Midnight Library by Matt Haig and loved it so when I was recommended The Humans I decided to pick it up. All I knew about it before hand was it involved aliens and body-snatching. We are introduced to the Martin family consisting of Professor Andrew Martin, his wife, Isobel and their son, Gulliver. However, Professor Andrew Martin has been abducted and killed by aliens and he has been replaced by one of these aliens. He was replaced because he solved a mathematical hypothesis and the aliens knows that the humans are ready for this leap in advancement so the alien is sent to destroy any evidence of Andrew solving the hypothesis. When the alien arrives on Earth, he appears in the wrong place so he wanders the night naked trying to make sense of the world. While the alien might look like Andrew he doesn’t have any of his memories and doesn’t have the slightest clue about how to appear human. He does have some information on Andrew like his name, age, and his family but these are limited.
The alien ends up getting arrested and sent to a mental hospital because of his strange behaviour and he uses this time to learn as much as he can about the humans and Andrew himself. He uses the gifts to get himself released and Isobel takes him home but he realises that the TV and radio signals tamper with his gifts. After a few days of adjusting he ends up finding the Professor’s office and on the computer he finds the evidence he was looking for. However, the entire novel is being told in the past tense by the alien detailing what happened on Earth for the rest of his kind. Due to this I believe that the alien does something unexpected by the others of its kind and it is telling its story. I don’t think the alien destroys the evidence because otherwise it would have no reason to stay on Earth since it already knows Andrew hadn’t told anyone about his solving of the hypothesis but the alien is intrigued by the humans especially Isobel right now. Considering everything we can see that Andrew while human neglected his family to work and his marriage suffered as a result but there might be more to the story that the alien will uncover in time.
As the alien learns more about the professor it learns that he has told two people about his discovery. The first is a colleague and fellow mathematician, Daniel Russel and the second is his son, Gulliver. While he tries to think about what to do with Gulliver as the alien doesn’t want to kill him, he goes to deal with Daniel. Upon arriving at Daniel’s home, he learns from his wife, Tabitha that Daniel has had a heart attack in the past. In Daniel’s office they discuss Andrew’s discovery and the alien reveals its identity to Daniel causing him to panic before giving him a heart attack with its gift. He does summon Tabitha before leaving but I think he left it long enough to kill Daniel and he deletes all the evidence Daniel has in his possession of the discovery. However, during this time we learn that Andrew might have been having an affair with a younger woman due to a phone number on his desk which would explain Isobel’s distant attitude. The saddest thing is that Andrew in the two years before his death allowed his relationship with Gulliver to go almost completely down the drain which the alien doesn’t understand the significance of yet but we, the readers do and the alien seems to be a massive improvement on the kind of person Andrew was.
After killing Daniel, Andrew begins to suffer from things like regret and depression accompanied by nightmares which is something completely foreign to his race and he begins to notice he is changing. It begins with his relationship with Newton the dog and it has begun expanding to his relationship with Isobel and Gulliver who have both noticed the changes in Andrew but hadn’t commented on it. Andrew’s lover, Maggie, also seems to be calling him and Isobel seems to understand her relationship with Andrew but hasn’t sent anything about it as she has unhappy with her role as wife and mother for a long time but continued to live with it. Andrew also contacts his people and advises he wants to hold off on killing Isobel and Gulliver and he can learn the true nature of the human race from them and they seem to agree with this but they worry that he is taking too long with the task. However, things become more complicated when Andrew’s best friend Ari invites him to the football and mentions that Andrew mentioned something top secret he was working on and the alien is worried that it is going to have to kill Ari and he doesn’t really want to despite not really knowing who Ari is. We can see that the alien is changing, it’s slow but it’s there and he also recognises this and is trying to hide the changes from the rest of his kind who would replace him swiftly and kill Isobel and Gulliver without a second thought.
As life progresses for the makeshift family, Andrew is beginning to realise how before he took over Andrew’s body that things were going horribly wrong for the family and that makes itself known very soon. After finding a novel written by Isobel, he begins to see the failings in their marriage and wants to fix it even though he isn’t the Andrew that broke it. He learns from Ari that he was supposedly having an affair with one of his students who is Maggie. When he returns to teach his first lecture he meets Maggie face to face and doesn’t understand who she is and what she wants even though she is talking about their monthly meetings where Andrew presumably cheated on his wife with a woman half her age. This becomes overshadowed when Andrew is warned by his people not to reveal himself or the potential idea of aliens watching the humans to them. After this warning things get worse when Gulliver tries to kill himself and almost succeeds but Andrew manages to bring him back with his gift. He is contacted again by his people to return home but he doesn’t want to and is going to fight them trying to bring him home at any cost because he cares about Isobel and Gulliver and is coming to love them. Unconsciously this alien is trying to repair the relationship Andrew destroyed starting with their son, as he explains to Gulliver that he is worth something he only needs to realise it.
Andrew is eventually confronted by his own kind about what he is doing and he asks to unplugged from the hive mind and have the gifts removed in order to be human and surprisingly, they agree it to. For a time, Andrew is comfortable living as a human but he ends up making his biggest mistake yet. While he feels he is being watched he writes this off as he doesn’t ever really encounter anyone but he gets up meeting up with Maggie again. Not understanding many things about humans he ends up having sex with her but realises partway through that it is wrong and returns home to his family. Here he confesses to Isobel that he has been having an affair or at least had sex with another woman and Isobel throws him out but this isn’t his fault but he genuinely doesn’t understand what he has been doing unlike the original Andrew. However, he ends up learning from a homeless man that he was spotted somewhere he couldn’t have been and he thinks his replacement has arrived and this is confirmed when he learns that Ari is dead. He rushes home to protect Isobel and Gulliver only to come face to face with another Andrew. The new Andrew explains he has been sent to destroy all the evidence of those who know about Andrew’s true nature like he revealed to Ari and that he is going to kill Isobel and Gulliver. The alien wants to protect the people he has come to love but the new Andrew won’t be persuaded and without his gifts he has to be smarter than this alien.
As we move into the final section of the novel, I was eager to see how Haig would concluded this story and I hope it has a happy ending. I am not going to say much about the final section of the novel as everything that happens throughout the novel can be a little boring at times but it leads to this conclusion. All I can say is that while it wasn’t as gripping as The Midnight Library, The Humans had a great message delivered in Matt Haig’s signature style and it left me a little sad but a lot happy. I will definitely be reading more from Matt Haig as I enjoy his fiction so I might even give his non-fiction a try even though I never read non-fiction.
Buy it here:
Paperback/Hardcover: amazon.co.uk amazon.com
Kindle Edition: amazon.co.uk amazon.com
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