‘A s consumers of culture, we’re both quite cold fish,’ says Michel Faber, linking eyes over the living room with his wife, Eva Youren. She’s stretched out on a window seat a few feet away. She nods in agreement. ‘We tend to see what the author or filmmaker is doing,’ Faber carries on, ‘but we stay quite. . .’ He pauses, as he often does, finding the best fitting word. ‘Detached?’Youren offers. ‘Yes, detached,’ he echoes.
Faber has just watched the TV adaptation of The Crimson Petal and the White. It’s a four-part series that will be on BBC Two this month. Faber’s original novel – published nearly ten years ago – introduced Sugar, a Victorian prostitute. Nineteen-years-old with a ‘masculine intellect’, she has a reputation for doing whatever a man wants.
Like his teen heroine’s unflinching approach to her job, Faber took a fearless, access-all-areas approach to writing her story. He followed Sugar through 800-odd pages, letting readers peer under her clothes at her ‘immature bosom’, look on when she faked it with a punter, then watch her squatting over a chamber pot filled with a home-made contraceptive mix. The book was full of sordid detail and grotesque plotlines about DIY abortion and mental illness. Although Victorian authors would have been reaching for the smelling salts, Faber filtered the squalor of London in 1875 through a modern lens, to make something entertaining, intelligent and totally addictive. He was typically meticulous in his research – papering the walls of his study with Victorian maps of London, and joining online forums to geek up on everything from weather reports to lavender harvesting and treatments of the time for female hysteria.
Layers of microscopic detail made it real, but it was the characters – flawed, infuriating, fascinating – that got readers hooked. So what did Faber make of the TV version? ‘Because I don’t have a television,’ he says, ‘I don’t know where things are at in terms of censorship — so I don’t know how brave they’ve been . . . They’ve been very clever. I think they’ve done an extraordinary job with it.’
Was it not difficult, I ask, to hand over such a labour of love to a TV team? ‘No, none of those 800-and- something pages are lost. The book is still there if people want it. This is a different project.’ He compares it to the time he went to the Barbican to watch a stage production of his short story The Fahrenheit Twins by theatre company Told by an Idiot. ‘It was wild and wacky. Really high-octane; so much fun, so inventive. I was happy; my story had given birth to this separate entity. It loses some things and it gains some things, and again with the TV series. Sure, [the BBC version] is darker overall than the book, it’s got more of a thriller pace to it, and there are elements of the book that are magnified to provide more televisual tension.
‘But I’d like to think if I’d hadn’t written the book, and if I was a TV watcher, I’d turn it on and be intrigued, and think, “This is very powerful, I’m going to stick with it.”’
Perched on the sofa in his Edinburgh flat, Faber talks
slowly, leans close, concentrates hard.
He is utterly engaged and engaging, nothing like the elusive, obstinate figure who gave up the literary scene a few years ago. A self-confessed ‘privacy junkie’, it’s only recently that he’s become more comfortable with the media. Both Faber and Youren are impressed with the BBC’s handling of the novel. When Faber heard Sugar was being played by Romola Garai (pictured, right), he did a YouTube search. ‘I saw this trailer – for a film where she played an egotistical Victorian novelist, Marie Corelli,’ he says. ‘She was completely bats, off her head. Romola did it very well. But that was the bodice and flouncy gowns, sweeping through ballrooms kind
Faber says he is ‘completely delighted’ with Chris O’Dowd’s (above) performance in the TV adaptation of his book
MICHEL FABER
of thing. They could have done that with The Crimson Petal and, thankfully, they didn’t.’ Besides Garai’s knock-out performance, Gillian X- Files Anderson appears as brothel madam Mrs Castaway, while Shirley Henderson and Richard E Grant play a do-gooder prude and sinister doctor. Probably the most unexpected star is Chris O’Dowd – The IT Crowd’s gormless geek – as William Rackham, the reluctant perfume heir who vainly fancies himself as a literary heavyweight. A connoisseur of prostitutes, with a soft spot for rough sex, Rackham reads about Sugar in More Sprees in London, his brothel guidebook, and tracks her down. Rackham was one of the characters that Faber rewrote several times, and he’s ‘completely delighted’ with O’Dowd’s performance.
‘Originally William was more villainous,’ Faber explains. ‘But with Eva’s urging I made him more complex and more likeable, which in a way makes him more villainous still. If someone’s a cartoon villain you can dismiss them, but if they behave despicably but you kind of like them, they really get under your skin. You have this sense that they ought to be able to do better, and yet they’ve let you down.’ Faber often takes his wife’s advice on his writing – in fact it was Youren who first put his unpublished short stories in envelopes and offered to post them. ‘Michel didn’t want to be published at all,’Youren remembers. ‘I think there are very few people who are writing full- time and don’t have a burning desire to be published. That conversation went on for six or seven years between us and finally, he agreed to send off some stuff. He was very stubborn.’
His wife is still one of his biggest fans – which is why she won’t let him give up on writing. Three years ago Youren was diagnosed with myeloma, a rare and terminal cancer. Although she was given three months to live, she has undergone chemotherapy and a bone- marrow transplant, and survived. ‘You can imagine that had a huge impact on me, and on us,’ Faber says. ‘She’s doing brilliantly now. It’s still going to kill her. We don’t know when. But it looks like she’s going to be with us for some years yet.’
It’s a bittersweet listen. Youren tells me about a birthday gift Faber gave her three years ago, thinking it would be her last. He asked musician friends to compose a piece of music for Eva, and gathered fresh material and covers from Brian Eno, Faust, Throbbing Gristle, Baby Dee and others onto a CDR. ‘I think that’s the most astounding gift ever,’ says Youren. ‘The most amazing gift in the world.’ ‘I’m obviously carrying stuff with me in my head all the time now,’ says Faber. ‘That empty space that I’m accustomed to when I’m writing is hard to find.’ He’s working on another novel but isn’t sure he’ll finish it. He hopes he can. The day we meet, Youren and Faber have just got back from a literary festival in China. ‘One of the reasons Michel got involved [in the literary scene] again was as a gift for me,’ explains Youren. ‘So that I’d be able to travel with him. I’ve always wanted to go to China,’ says Youren. ‘I mean, if I’d already died, I have my great doubts he’d have gone.’
‘It’s definitely not a Paul and Linda McCartney thing,’
Faber insists. ‘We spend lots of time apart too.’
‘You can’t be together all the time,’ Youren adds. ‘You need time to develop and grow on your own.’ When Youren is in Edinburgh receiving treatment, Faber is at their home in Ross-shire. But they stay in touch; he sends photos of their cats, she sends photos and short stories she’s written. ‘I want to read Michel’s work,’ Youren says. ‘It improves the quality of my life. And I know a lot of people who feel the same way.’
The Crimson Petal and The White will be shown on BBC 2 at 9pm on Wed 6 Apr. The full version of this interview can be read online at list.co.uk 31 Mar–28 Apr 2011 THE LIST 25