A human's take on The Humans

Some time ago when I commented on The Midnight Library by Matt Haig, a book I love dearly and believe to be something more than “conservative self-help,” although a great pick-me-up, I mentioned that I wanted to read more by him, especially The Humans, which I’ve been aware of for quite some time. The title and blurb set up the expectation that its themes would be similar, and technically they do both explore the sort of question of: “Why do humans live?” or even, “What does it take for your life to have purpose or meaning?” It’s been over a year since I last read The Midnight Library so I won’t delve into why I think it does an infinite better job at answering the questions the story poses on humans, their lives and shenanigans, but I will explain why I think that The Humans is simply not a good novel and that it irritated me, just to put it simply and because I am not a proper critic.

I didn’t hate absolutely everything about this book, so I’ll first name a few things that I appreciated about the novel. I found his journey of trying to understand the nature of humans interesting, how it starts off as purely carnal as if humans were some animal only ruled by their desires, building “temples to the orgasm”, a fair point, and then how he references some philosopher, I can’t remember who it was, about a theory of human nature. Overall I enjoyed the references to other authors and artists through his journey of discovery, I felt it gave him a more human touch, aside from the aspect of it I will discuss later on. It reminded me of The Midnight Library and Nora’s references to different philosophers as she hops from life to life, trying to find the “right” one. 

Secondly, upon reflection I think it’s interesting to compare the political systems of the aliens to the humans’, as the former think that they are far superior to the latter, but seem to have a sort of successful communist system, while the humans notoriously fail at exactly that. It would seem like some propaganda if the protagonist hadn’t turned against the leaders in the end (I won’t apologise for the spoilers because hopefully they discourage you even further from reading this book), but the emphasis on how painless and harmonious their system is was getting suspicious.

Let’s now get into my more pressing thoughts about this book. The story begins with an alien being sent down to Earth in the body of a mathematics professor who recently proved Riemann’s hypothesis of the order of prime numbers and with an order to kill anyone who may know that it had been solved. The aliens disdain the humans for their inferior intelligence and praise their own society and level of intellect for their understanding of mathematics and the universe, which in turn has allowed them luxuries such as elimination of all pain, suffering, and death. They believe humans are evil because of their tendency of war, torture, etc. This being said, would it be surprising if I said that fairly early on in the book, I kept wondering why the alien is on Earth in the first place? Why do the aliens care if humans develop a higher understanding of mathematics? Having the alien species so obsessed with utilitarianism and the maximisation of pleasure, or at least the minimisation of pain, the novel seems to pose that the aliens actually do care about the suffering of humans and want to prevent humans to be able to use these advanced mathematical discoveries to inflict more harm on each other. You have to wonder, if they disdain them so, why do the aliens even care that we’d use this knowledge for harm? They never seem concerned about the possibility of this leading the humans to eventually discover the aliens themselves and then trying to inflict harm on them, it is not even hinted at, so they are solely thinking about humans harming other humans, not the planet, or other species. If they believe humans are truly evil and of meager intelligence, why would the aliens even spare a glance at them killing or causing each other pain? In the case of the aliens wanting to minimise all pain in the universe as a part of their philosophy, wouldn’t some kind of intervention prove more helpful than repeated hindrance of their development as a species? With this, my point is that the setup for the novel is weak and seems to be inconsistent throughout the book.

Speaking of inconsistencies, there was one in particular that bothered me more than others and it occurred in one of the last chapters of the novel: “Advice for a human”, in which the protagonist lists advice for his “son” to read after he leaves his “family”. First of all, some of the advice doesn’t even seem to have the goal of guiding decision making, such as: “You’re a good human.” That is just a statement. The one that bothered me especially was nr. 92, whereby he advices his son to love his future children equally because otherwise, they will notice and it will have consequences, hinted at through his metaphor of atoms and how it only needs one of them for “a big explosion”, as if the children will be hurt by to being loved equally. This is coming from a person that, only a few short chapters ago, discovered through his actions that romantic love tends to be possessive and that his wife will be jealous and hurt if he has sex with another woman. He just learned that, and like with his other knowledge of human behaviour, it was from experience. It’s made clear early on in the book when he first arrives on Earth that to understand human interaction and behaviour, he must experience it for himself, such as when he absorbs the English language through trashy magazines and then believes that buildings are, once again, “temples to the orgasm”, and when he passes the University of Cambridge, piecing the information he’s had available to him, believes that “Corpus Christi” must mean “tantric full body orgasm”. He clearly learns and gains understanding through experience, and yet near the end of the novel, he can somehow give insight into parenting multiple children and their reception to different treatment from him, having only posed as a father of a single son. His sudden superior understanding of human love being pushed on me as sincere bothered me to my core.

After all his experience of murder, romantic cheating, falling in love and having sex, all of which are particularly human for him as he does not experience pain and suffering or love and joy on his planet, the moral we are left with at the end of the novel is essentially: “To live is to love.” I need to discuss the event of him discovering the “meaning of life” after having sex for the first time before I get into the message of the book. Sure, I thought to myself that his discovery was more about how we as humans absorb all the information the world has to offer through physical sensations and sensory organs, using our biology to communicate meaning to each other. This he is deprived of in his society as he doesn’t seem to interact with the other aliens like that based on his anecdotes from his home planet, rather, technology serves them in every manner. Despite this, his enlightenment occurring right after and as a direct result of having sex for the first time comes off as a serious intent of the author just trying to make the novel as tacky as possible.

Having cleared that, as mentioned, the ultimate message of the novel is that love is what makes the suffering of human life worth it, which we can see when he decides to become fully human and lose his powers to be able to live with and love his family and immediately feels the physical pain of daily human life. I will just put it simply here: Did we need a whole new novel written and published to spread this information? Yes, writers should have the freedom of speech in their writing and publishing as long as it causes no harm to others, I won’t deny it, and I am using that freedom to say that in my personal opinion I believe that this book over dramatises the sentiment it pushes about how love is the only thing that makes human life worth it to live amidst its pain and suffering. It is no original thought, published or not, and at least the author admits that with his quotations to Emily Dickinson and others throughout the novel. But at that point, what is there in a novel that uses other writers’ words to prove their point? Prove your own point. Despite that, personally, I cannot frankly believe I spent hours of my life reading a book that told me: “To love is to live,” as if it was proving some unheard of revelation to me. I’ll admit, if this were targeted towards children, or even young adults, I wouldn’t be quite so critical on this point, but proved through the murder and sexual scenes, as well as the age of the protagonist, this moral being directed to adults is unnecessary, overstated, and infantilising.

In conclusion, unless you are in fact an alien that needs help on acceptable human behaviour or maybe just wants to relate to someone having a similar experience acclimatising to life on earth, do not waste your time with this book.