"The Book of Strange New Things" by Michel Faber

A young British Christian minister signs up to spread the Gospel on another planet. The lovely wife he leaves at home is pregnant, as it happens, and must navigate her way through the alarmingly hazardous Earth of the near future. She watches aghast as tsunamis, volcanoes, drought, famine, and genocide devastate more and more of the planet. She waits in vain for rubbish pickup service, becomes injured cleaning up her home after a freak storm, and faces life-threatening conditions at the hospital where she works as a nurse.

Author Michel Faber clearly wanted to make a statement about the 21st-Century state of the planet - he shows it to us from the incomprehensible distance of the planet Oasis, where the minister has gone as a missionary. But the alien planet is so placid and unchanging, and its human complement of staff so phlegmatic and so complying, that barely anything happens there, other than to Peter, the cleric.

The fraying relationship between Peter and his wife Bea forms the core of this story. They send text communications back and forth and through these we watch as the tension mounts. As befits his central theme, Faber handles this progress more subtly and more effectively than anything else in the novel. He sets this against the backdrop of the collapsing, disaster-beset Earth, where human society takes pains to tear itself apart.

A few notes for sci-fi readers: the author describes the alien planet in fairly rudimentary terms, and he invests zero text to the science of inter-galactic travel. His devout aliens have a certain personality, but aside from hinted-at physical weaknesses, do not hold our (my) interest strongly. No, the marriage of Peter and Bea occupies center stage, and their threatened separation focuses the book.

Faber handles this focus well; his strategy of placing millions of light years between them has a certain novelty. It’s difficult for me to develop strong feelings about this novel, so perhaps be guided by that lack.