FINAL
CHAPTER
A personal tragedy and his decision to quit fi ction have brought Michel Faber to a turning point in his career. Claire Sawers meets a writer who is considering his own literary legacy
W hen Michel Faber began writing his latest novel, The Book of Strange New Things, he knew it would be his last. What he didn’t know is that it would end up being not just a farewell to his career as a novelist, but also to his other half, Eva Youren. In their case, the term ‘other half’ is practically literal. Faber’s wife – his unofi cial manager / literary editor / mentor / PA / friend, or to give her a more grandiose label, his personal saviour (the reclusive Faber once thanked her for ‘bringing me back to earth’) – was diagnosed with a rare plasma cell cancer, and died in early July.
‘The book was conceived before Eva was diagnosed,’ says Faber who, when we meet in the living room of his Edinburgh l at, is wearing several days’ stubble and a threadbare Rammstein t-shirt. The chameleonic, addictive i ction writer is probably best known for his Victorian sex-work epic The Crimson Petal and the White and alien sci-i thriller Under the Skin, which was recently adapted into a i lm with Scarlett Johansson.
He may be a little subdued today, but Faber hasn’t lost any of his ability to casually drill deep into the conversation, mining it unexpectedly, hitting hard insights while talking about his cats, or a pair of shoes. He’s just back from an American book tour, and pulls out Eva’s red ankle boots from his not-yet-unpacked bag. He beams sheepishly as he explains how he photographed the shoes next to things Eva would have liked. ‘The book was always going to be about grief; grief at how we treat each other and the planet. Loss of precious human beings. But I wasn’t expecting to lose Eva.’ Faber always intended his i nal novel to be ‘a journey into the darkness’, relying on the reader’s trust as he led them, and himself, into unmapped territory. An ‘obsessive shaper’, his work this time was deliberately much less planned. ‘Always being in control of everything, I felt uneasy. Really good books need a chaos element, something weird or inexplicable.’
With supremely cruel irony, Faber has noticed before that his books sometimes end up being ‘anticipatory, almost prophetic’, and The Book of Strange New Things – about a Christian missionary’s voyage to another planet – was no different. In this part dystopian travelogue, part epistolary love story, Peter and Bea are separated while he goes to preach to the indigenous people of Oasis, a foetus-faced species who speak with otherworldly, asthmatic voices, sounding like ‘a i eld of rain-sodden lettuces being cleared by a machete’. As Peter makes progress with the Oasan people, Bea is back on earth, witnessing it short circuit in freak weather disasters and spasms of civil unrest. ‘It’s
an enormously sad book, obviously. Heartbreaking things happen in it. I was writing it, line by line, as Eva became incredibly ill, and later when I lived with her in the hospital where she died. But I didn’t think it would be fair to make it the ultimate feel-bad book. I couldn’t do that to people.’
into cheesy, sentimental Faber wanted to i nd some consolation, without straying territory. ‘So often the “uplifting” thing just ends up being really platitudinous. Pathetic and specious. I really wanted to avoid that.’ And he has. On the surface, The Book of Strange New Things reads like an Orwellian bad dream, if JG Ballard and Kurt Vonnegut found themselves wandering the sterile hallways of a space base i lled with piped-in Patsy Cline songs, maggot- based hybrid foods and out-of-date lesbian porn mags. It’s a morose, matter-of-fact allegory on modern life, but one enlightened by Faber’s gentle, resigned wisdom.
‘I’m not normally superstitious,’ says Faber, ‘but I didn’t write any dedication in the front of the advance proofs. All the other books were dedicated to Eva, but for this one I was a bit spooked. I was very much hoping for a remission, that she’d live longer; it felt almost like inviting bad karma.’ The i nished copies, to be published three months after her death, will say, ‘For Eva, always’.
‘Eva said she’d like a dedication. This one was very precious to her. She’d worked on it a great deal, as with all the others. It’s obviously valedictory, and about saying goodbye to the l esh.’ As the person who initially jumpstarted Faber’s career and coaxed him out of his crippling shyness, Eva was ‘distraught’ at the prospect of him giving up writing i ction. ‘She was worried about me just shutting myself away as I tend to do. But I’m trying to say yes rather than no, and I want to live the sort of life she’d have liked me to live after her death.’ Although Faber says he’s written his last novel (‘most works of art disappear down the plughole. If one of my books is destined to be remembered by anyone, it’s probably already out there’), he’ll continue writing poetry and non-i ction, with plans for a book on music theory ‘which will probably appeal to 178 people in the whole world’. He also talks of an intriguing plan to possibly ‘collaborate’ with Eva, and add to some of her own uni nished writing. ‘We discussed that. We had some wonderfully precious and intimate times and the relationship dei nitely deepened towards the end. It’s hard to think that might be extinguished.’
The Book of Strange New Things is published by Canongate, Thu 23 Oct. Michel Faber talks at Assembly Roxy, Edinburgh, Tue 28 Oct.
STAYING IN Special
Top5 Autumn Books Curl up with these recent releases
DAVID NICHOLLS Us (Hodder & Stoughton) Flushed by the success of the loveable One Day and not put off by the poorness of the i lm version, David Nicholls here swaps youthful romance for lived-in, mature love, as a couple and their teenage son go on what could be their i nal holiday together.
IAN McEWAN The Children Act (Jonathan Cape) Witness the middle classes in turmoil again, as Ian McEwan turns to a subject pulled from the news for his latest novel. Fiona Maye is a childless High Court judge whose marriage is in trouble, and whose decision on whether a teenage boy should be medically treated against his parents’ religious faith opens a can of worms.
VAL McDERMID Forensics: The Anatomy of Crime (Proi le Books) Kirkcaldy crime novelist Val McDermid sets aside i ction for fact with this, her latest book, which investigates the history and current application of forensic science from a personal perspective.
IAN RANKIN The Beat Goes On: The Complete Rebus Stories (Orion) Autumn wouldn’t be autumn without a new offering from Ian Rankin, but in a year in which his professed desire has been to take it off and do something else, how to i ll the gap? With this, a collection of Inspector Rebus shorts including two new stories.
LENA DUNHAM Not That Kind of Girl: A Young Woman Tells You What She’s ‘Learned’ (4th Estate) It’s all too easy to mock memoir and autobiography written by people too young to have reasonably gained more than a couple of chapters of life experience, but 28-year-old hipster, i lmmaker, actress, creator and star of HBO’s Girls Lena Dunham must be an exception. Expect sex, love and feminist awakening.
(David Pollock)
16 Oct–13 Nov 2014 THE LIST 29