We are sitting in The Crimson Petal as we speak,” says Michel Faber,
gesturing around the bare kitchen of his flat close to The Meadows in
Edinburgh, a flat with a manly nimbus of domestic non-observance and pine
seats that squeak tortuously in response to every movement on them.
What he means is that this is the flat The Crimson Petal paid for. His 2002 novel,
properly titled The Crimson Petal and the White, was a grand, post-feminist
update of the Dickensian doorstop and a freakish global bestseller for
Faber, an expansive 835-page landmark on the landscape of a writer better
known as a literary miniaturist.
But the fruit of its success is a flat in which, clearly, a man lives alone.
There are English-language copies and foreign translations of his own books
strewn around and, in the absence of the statutory cup of coffee, Faber has
the distracted, apologetic air of an artist knuckling down to the unsavoury
task of hawking his wares.
Lined up beneath the windows that look down on the ethnic delicatessens of
Tollcross is a makeshift display of album sleeves, continental jazz and
progressive rock of stunningly obscure origin. This would not be passed in
any home.
Faber gives me the grand tour, in reality a halting meander from kitchen to
sitting room and back again, then notes blankly that he may well be spending
more time here in the future, away from his long-time base in the wilds of
Ross and Cromarty.
Faber’s partner of two decades, his ideal reader and critic Eva Youren is
chronically unwell, he says, living with cancer.
Faber is well accustomed to adversity, though; before Youren he admits he was
“the ultimate misfit”, an awkward Dutch-born anomaly transplanted to the
sun-blind boorishness of southern Australia. It was Youren who encouraged
him to submit his writing to short-story competitions, firing the starting
pistol on his career. And now he faces the uncertainty of serious threat to
the woman who is not only the crucible, but also the conduit of his sparse,
elegant fictions.
You would be mistaken, however, if you imagined Faber would consider the
subject in the emotional upper register. He sits straight-backed in his
kitchen chair and speaks with a soft deliberateness, as though reciting the
facts for the umpteenth time.
Slender, and feminine of feature, Faber seems to be a kind of evolved thinking
machine at times, a denizen of pure, clear-sighted thought. “This illness
has made me more confused than ever about my role as a writer,” he says. “On
the one hand, I feel like saying, look, what’s going on in my own life, with
loved ones, is more important than the agenda of any publisher or what’s
going on in bookshops. Therefore I should say no to everything, not write
any more, not communicate, just vanish entirely and concentrate on the
precious time I have with Eva.
“This has had a huge impact on our lives, it’s made our time together much
more precious in some ways. And yet, oddly, we’ve had some of our most
wonderful experiences together since Eva was diagnosed.”
Faber’s latest novel, The Fire Gospel, his fifth, deals with mythology,
particularly the legend of Prometheus. It reimagines the titan of the Greek
world as Theo Griepenkerl, a Canadian academic who trawls war-torn Iraq in
search of treasures for his museum. He uncovers nine papyri written by a
first-century Christian convert named Malchus that purport to tell the true,
red-top version of Christ’s crucifixion.
In Malchus’s gospel Christ soils himself on the cross, has his eyes and
entrails pecked out by birds and his followers then attend a wake at which
“there are hints of drug use”.
The next thing Griepenkerl knows, a bomb has gone off as he signs copies of
the new gospel. Just as Prometheus gave fire to mankind and came to regret
it, Griepenkerl discovers — in a context electrified by the war on terror
and the mystic sensationalism of Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code — that there
are “incendiary consequences” to marketing Christianity’s secret history.
“Is humanity ever going to be finished with religion?” Faber asks, summarising
the novel’s theme. “Clearly not, it will exist as long as there are people.
Nothing will kill it. Richard Dawkins can squawk all he likes, but he’ll
never diminish the human need for a supernatural agency that holds things
together. The real question of the novel is, how do we live in a world where
some of us believe and some of us don’t?”
Mythology is an apt diving board for Faber, partly because it dovetails with
the donnish moral conundrums of his writing; he is a restless, explorative
author among whose subjects have been alien flesh-farming in the Highlands
in Under The Skin, presently being adapted for the cinema, Victorian
prostitution, Gothic archeology and a capella music.
It’s also fitting because, in many ways, Faber is a mythological creature
himself, a New Yorker cartoon of the sensitive author. Before meeting Youren
he squirreled away two decades of writing, never striving for publication,
convinced he would remain undiscovered until after his death.
“I likened myself to George Harrison doing his gardening,” he explains,
deploying one of his frequent musical analogies. “Harrison was devoted to
his garden, but who was ever going to see it? Only those who were his
friends and family, those he chose to give the privilege to. That’s the way
I looked at being an author.”
Writers, typically, are rambunctious opportunists, social gadflies, garrulous
self-advertisers. Faber is wholly frailer. It isn’t just the Beatles bowl
cut he has retained until the age of 48 or the delicate whisper of his
manners, not even his long, perfectly assembled sentences or that he can
carry off an artistic rollneck sweater.
Everything in Faber’s mythology informs his enigma of Jesuitical, writerly
purity. The troubled childhood in The Hague, the truth of which Faber
prefers to remain fugitive, but which pivots around a disturbed half-brother
who ended up in care, his crippling migraines and long history of panicked
eccentricity and the analytical detachment and disinterest in the literary
carnival; essentially, a discomfort with virtually everything bar his wife
and his own abilities.
He tells a story about a promotional visit to Italy when he spent the day
accosting tourists on where they were staying because he judged the hotel in
which his publishers had placed him too comfortable.
“I had tried so hard, and Eva had tried to communicate our values to whoever
had booked us in,” he says. “I wanted to be in a really down-to-earth place
or, preferably, to sleep on someone’s floor. I couldn’t bear this anonymous
corporate place they’d put me in. Other authors are probably mature or
relaxed, but I spit the dummy if I feel I’m being morally tainted.
“If you multiply that experience in every city I’ve visited around the world
for the length of time that I’ve been a successful author, you get an idea
of the stress that being a writer puts on me, and of what Eva has to get me
through.”
Eva is the pivotal part of Faber’s mythology and it is a remarkable
relationship by any standards. Faber has dedicated the bulk of his books to
her and she seems to act as his umbilicus to the non-literary world, as his
muse, “an excellent reader and critic”, nursemaid, photographer and sounding
board, a Gala to his Dali.
A former teacher with two teenage sons by a previous relationship, she and
Faber met two decades ago in Melbourne when Faber rented a room in her
house. It was Eva who fell in love with their house in Fearn during a trip
to Europe, although during their initial months there Faber contemplated
suicide. She is, Faber says, the only person who has the telephone number of
his Edinburgh flat — her and a recorded message that rings up to offer
holiday bargains.
Youren, 53, was diagnosed recently with myeloma, an incurable, though
remitting, plasma cell cancer of the bone marrow. We don’t touch on his
wife’s prognosis, and Faber is hardly the sort who succumbs to
sentiment, so there’s a face-the-facts simplicity that is a bravery of its
own kind.
Faber has spoken in the past of an indifference to his own death. But death,
he believes, is merely an impediment to his writing more books.
It’s a measure of his devotion to Youren, then, that he offered to forsake
writing to care for her, an offer she declined. “Eva is an enormously
generous person and she has always been the one who encouraged me to put my
work out there. It’s because of her that I got published in the first place,
she smoothed over a lot of things that would have been obstacles for me. She
helped my writing career last a lot longer than it would have done if left
to me.
“Eva has always taken the view that it’s not the reader’s problem or concern
what is going on in my life. It’s none of anybody’s business. Between writer
and reader it’s a totally clean transaction. A book is a gift and the writer
just gives it.
“So, if I said to Eva, ‘I will never write again as long as you live, I’ll
just concentrate on being with you’, that would be the worst thing in the
world I could say to her.
“She wants me to communicate and be generous and share. And that same
encouragement is why I’m sitting in this kitchen, not in Australia listening
to albums of avant-garde progressive jazz.”
Instead, Faber lines their sleeves along the wainscotting and counts the
solitary hours in the big city, confronted by a deadline infinitely more
demanding than any literary endeavour and plumbing the depths of a soul
mined in the books that he and Eva brought into being.
The Fire Gospel is published by Canongate, £12.99
