Much of the first half of the novel is taken up by his puzzled analyses of primitive human ways: the nightly news, he reckons, should be renamed The War and Money Show getting drunk is how humans forget they are mortal, while hangovers are how they remember. This presents a real problem, given that the mission is to kill them both.Īs this story develops, so the narrator and his narration change. The alien in turn, at first baffled and disgusted by humans, grows increasingly attached to his Earth family.

Stilted and strange though the alien's speech and behaviour continue to be, Martin's wife and teenage son spot hardly any difference from the original, save for some hilarious efforts to match the son's swearing and the suspicious way he bothers to put his used crockery in the dishwasher.Īctually, the Vonnadorian seems to offer an improved version of the human husband and father.

These initial attempts to fit into human society may not have been completely successful, but they improve a little, thanks not only to his superior Vonnadorian intelligence but also to the fact that the late Professor Martin was evidently the kind of mathematical genius who could quite conceivably have had a breakdown that would leave him running around Corpus Christi college in the nude. Here he continues to inspire much shouting and pointing until he reaches the ex-professor's college, where he is arrested. Having flicked through a copy of Cosmopolitan to pick up the local language, he then makes his way to Cambridge. Promptly run over, the naked alien hero regenerates, escapes from the shocked ambulance crew and heads to the nearest building – a weirdly rectangular and bizarrely static refuelling station labelled Texaco. Instead of finding himself in Martin's office, our nameless Vonnadorian has arrived in the middle of the M11, with no understanding of human culture and wearing his victim's body but not a stitch of clothing.

But the instantaneous intergalactic travel hasn't turned out quite as expected. That's the backstory to a book that opens with our alien narrator finding himself in the body of the professor, whom he has just assassinated.

The humans matt haig reviews