Faber, who was born in the Netherlands and grew up in Australia, plays a special role among contemporary European authors, as his work can hardly be narrowed down to one genre or theme. His debut novel Under The Skin, about an alien that captures humans on Earth, is ultimately a reflection on alienation and estrangement, while his greatest commercial success is the neo-Victorian novel The Crimson Pettle And The White about the prostitute Sugar. His (probably) last novel for adults, The Book Of Strange New Things, in which a missionary travels to a distant planet, is a poignant story about love and grief. Now his non-fictional work Listen has finally been published in Germany: his book about his ‘oldest love’, music, as it says right at the beginning of the book. I met Faber at the Zagava headquarters in Düsseldorf.
In your new book, I think it was published in English about two years ago, you’ve written that because music was your first love, that in a way you always wanted to write a book like that. What was it then that finally gave you the push to say, well, now I’m gonna do that?
I feel I’m tidying up. I never wanted to be the sort of writer who just puts books out because that’s my job and that’s what I’m good at and so on. So I had a sense of how many novels were in me, and I’ve written those novels. I might do a book of photography if someone wants to publish it, but that would probably be my only book of photography. I should explain that I come from a line, a genetic line that is not very robust. All the male Fabers in my family died before they were 59, some of them a long time before they were 59. And I’m 65 now. And that doesn’t mean that I’m gonna drop dead tomorrow. I have a much better diet than a lot of the men in my family. They tended to chain smoke and eat shit, and they went through the second World War and all of that, but it also means the statistics are not good, and I can’t assume that I’m going to reach 80.
So for a long time now, I’ve been counting the books down. Which ones do I still need and wish to do? And when I started The Book of Strange New Things, I told my wife, Eva, that that was the last novel and it, I think it will remain the last novel for grownups. I have since written one novel for children [D: A Tale Of Two Worlds]. So the music book was a way of getting something done that I’d wanted to do for a long time. I don’t know whether I will write another book about music. I have to cut an enormous amount out of the version of this and that was published. But music changes very quickly, so I don’t know if I have the energy and the patience to rewrite and revisit those areas for another book. So this may be the only book about music, and I’m satisfied that I got it done at last. It means that I don’t have to worry about dying, you know? Without it having been done.
After I had finished reading the book, I think I read a review somewhere, in a British magazine or newspaper, I think in a way the writer implied that you were a bit elitist because you were writing about all these weird artists, and I thought: Haven’t they finished the book? I remember the passage when you write about Nana Mouskouri.
Yeah.
And I listened to her version of “Scarborough Fair“.
I feel it’s a very un-elitist book, and in fact, it’s challenging elitists to examine their elitism and look at where it comes from and listen to the music that, inverted commas, ordinary people like, and ask themselves whether that music is really so different from what they value, and if so, why? I think I was naive with reviews because one of the things the book strongly urges, is trying to make people feel less nervous about music, less anxious and defensive about their own tastes. So one of the ways that I urge that is by suggesting that the so-called experts, the authorities, the gatekeepers, their relationship with music is just as emotional and irrational and tribal as anybody else’s. They’re not in a superior zone. They’re just in a different zone, a tribal zone. And once you realize that these gatekeepers and these authorities don’t have greater, more exalted insight than anybody else, that frees you up, makes you more relaxed with your own taste, less anxious about what you should and shouldn’t like. And I think I was naive to think that I could challenge these authorities and these gatekeepers without them biting me in the ass. Because that’s their identity, to be the gatekeeper, to be the authority. But to write a book that tries to dismantle snobbishness and then to be accused of being a snob is bizarre. But you know, I can’t control that, of course. I just have to accept that.
In one of your earlier short stories, “The Courage Consort“, music played a large role. Have you ever thought of putting your love to music in a larger, fictional context?
There are some unpublished short stories of mine, which would add up to a novella, and each story is set in a different era. So one story is set in the prog era and then another one in the punk era and so on. And if I can find it in myself to engage, if I can write a good enough story, I would like to update, write some further episodes, one set perhaps in the dawn of downloading. And another set in the modern day when music is really just data in a stream. But they would have to be good stories. I wouldn’t want them to just complete the concept; they’d have to be really good stories in their own right. And I don’t know if it’s in me to do that, but if I can, then there could be this themed sequence of short stories. Perhaps the same guy could have children and he could have to confront the way his children relate to music compared to how he related to music. I don’t know. I don’t want to tell people I’m working on something if I’m really not. I mean, what I’m really working on is, is taking photographs of the Intrepid blonde and the current project, again, it’s another tidying up project when Eva, my second wife, died. She left behind many, many unfinished stories, and I’m finishing those stories at the moment. That’s my sort of fictional project. I hope I’ll be able to finish that. It’s going well so far. My life at the moment is just trying to make sure that things are not undone. That I had hoped would be done.
Have you ever had your publisher telling you: “Hey, why don’t you write The Crimson Petal And The White, part two” or whatever?
It’s very interesting you asked that because I’ve been very lucky to be with Cannongate for all these years. They are still an independent publisher. They’re much bigger than they used to be, but when Under The Skin was published and didn’t sell hugely well, but got really good reviews and made an impact on the Scottish literary scene, I went to my publisher and I said: “Look. I am very grateful what you’ve done with this book, and clearly there’s an appetite for what I write. Would you like me to write another book that is also set in Scotland? It wouldn’t be Under the Skin part two, obviously. but. I could try to write a book that was recognizably by the same author.“ And he said: “Well, what does your heart tell you to write?“ And I said: “Well, I fancy going back to this huge Victorian novel that I wrote when I was younger about this prostitute in 1875.“ And I’m having this conversation with my publisher at a time when this whole Victorian thing hadn’t happened yet. It was just before. And he said: “Well, if that’s what your heart tells you to write, then write that.“ So I wrote or rewrote The Crimson Petal, unrecognizable as the author of Under the Skin. So in publishing terms, suicidal in a way because there was no way of building on the critical success of Under the Skin. But by sheer coincidence, it came out at exactly the right time when other books, I can’t remember when Fingersmith [by Sarah Waters] came out [2002], but you know that that whole fad for Victorian literature. And it was huge. And it was great for Cannongate. They sold it into lots of languages, and it did very well. And, you know, I paid off the mortgage on my house in Scotland.
The lesson there is, instead of trying to copy an earlier success or carve out a niche, which then becomes a cliche, you just do the thing that you really want to do. And in my case, it’s certainly paid off.
Because you mentioned Cannongate: One of your novels, The Fire Gospel, was published in their Myths-series. A. S. Byatt’s Ragnarök was also published there. She won the Booker Prize for Possession, which was also this huge novel at least partly set in Victorian England.
I don’t know if you’ve read it, I have. It’s a good book.
It’s a good book. Absolutely. I mean, both novels are very different. Do you also see similarities, between the two of you in the way you approach that time?
She’s very, very English and I’m very, very European. All my formative influences, were long before I was published because I didn’t get published until I was 38, and I’d been writing books since I was 14, 13. So the writers that really influenced me were the writers that I was reading when I was a teenager, and the supposedly major authors of our time, A. S. Byatt and so forth, I didn’t read them until I’d already written lots of books – which people hadn’t read because I put them away in a drawer. But I was formed as a writer already. There’s also lots of authors that people imagine that I’ve read, that I must have read, surely that I’ve never read because I’ve always been listening to music instead. And I know that I’ll never get around to reading those great authors and I’m sure they’re great authors, but I’ve got lots of LPs I want to get around to first and as I get older, my fiction bookshelf shrinks and shrinks. I get rid of books that I know I’m never going to read, and I’m just left with lots and lots of comics, lots of LPs, lots of CDs.
And art books. I do buy art books, but not particularly to read the text, I have to say. What about you?
I still try to read lots of fiction. Normally, you know, the cliche is that males read the nonfictional books, the women read literature, et cetera. Basically I try to, as time allows, read as much as possible, I also try to listen to as much music as possible. Watch films. But of course I sometimes got the impression over the years it’s becoming more and more difficult for films to really leave an impression. I mean, there’s still some things that I really, really, like, I loved David Lynch’s third season of Twin Peaks when it came out to 2017. I mean, the music you listen to when you were 16 or 17 may stick with you but at the same time, there’s still so much great music coming out.
There’s extraordinary music being made. It’s a wonderful period for music. I’m listening to new stuff all the time, stuff that’s unfamiliar to me, and I don’t revisit, I’m not playing my old favorites. And I think that’s partly to do with my neurodivergence, but also because I’m curious about what’s going on now. When old people claim that the music that young people are listening to is shit, I think there’s a lot of fear there, and anxiety about growing old and becoming irrelevant. And all the wonderful musical discoveries that I made that you and I made decades ago are being made now by young people just with different artists that we’ve never heard of. And there is so much stuff coming out. There’s a lot of stuff coming out that is not commercialized. One of the ways that music works nowadays is that it reaches its fans more directly. You’ll be their follower, their fan, they’ll have a little cottage industry where they make their stuff and they send it to you and it’s not going to get reviewed in the major newspapers or the music magazines. Music magazines are really just nowadays promotional engines for major label companies. They’re really not interested in looking at music that’s being made independently because it’s got nothing to do with how they’re funded. So a lot of old farts will read Mojo Magazine or The Guardian or whatever, and they’ll think, yeah, but this is all just retreads of what what was done first in the sixties and seventies, there’s nothing really new going on. Well, there is new stuff going on. It’s just not going to be written about in Mojo or The Guardian. That’s not where you are going to find out about it. And in order to find out about it, you have to have that energy, that enormous energy that we had as teenagers driven by curiosity and excitement at discovering that music could do the things that we’d never imagined it could do, and basically you need to be 18 for that or 23, and we can’t be 18 or 23 anymore. That’s just the way it is. The least we can do is stop making these ignorant generalizations about how terrible the taste of young people is.
Even older people have terrible taste. I think they can’t even grasp what what other kind of music is out there.
In the chapter “Who Doesn’t Like Music?” I look at people who can take or leave music. It really isn’t that important to them. A lot of people just want something on in the background while they’re doing something else. Or they want to have a topic of conversation with their tribal group. In the era when music was a big deal and new LPs by various artists were a cultural phenomenon, and everyone was expected to know about them, lots of people bought those albums and gave them some attention in order to be able to talk to their tribal group. They didn’t really care about the music. They cared about their tribal group. And a lot of the music that is shallowly consumed by certain tribes of youngsters nowadays serves the purpose of defining the tribal group, but because that music is not being given the attention that the music was given in the seventies and sixties, it’s easy for old farts to say, well, you know, back in our day, music had substance. That argument can be made in very narrow terms about certain kinds of major label industrially produced music. But it misses the point in a way because so many of the people back in our day really couldn’t give a shit, really didn’t have a deep relationship with that music. It served its purpose socially. It was something to talk about with one’s peers, and I think this expands out into a conversation about art as a whole. I think there’s relatively few people who passionately engage with art. Most people, whether we’re talking about people in the 19th century or people in the 1970s, or people now, the majority of people don’t really have much use for art. It’s a niche. You know it’s a niche passion; in the same way that there are a few people who really love food and really care about food. Others just want to get themselves fed. Or there are some people who are passionately devoted to gardening. Other people actually wouldn’t mind if it was just concreted over. It would solve the problem. If they got admiration from their neighbors by having a shrub or a tree, then they would have a shrub or a tree. It doesn’t score very highly in their list of passions. I don’t know, am I being too cynical?
I don’t think so. By the way, there’s even a Facebook page devoted to terrible gardens, because nowadays people tend to put stones there and so hardly any plants are left. I have a question about a specific collaboration: You worked with Andrew Liles. How did that come about? I think on the first track there’s something like a German telephone message.
Liles loves all that stuff. I wanted to have Spandau Ballet’s “True“ in it because it’s a record I particularly loathe. Unfortunately, Andrew said that he couldn’t afford to get sued for royalties by whatever corporation owned Spandau Ballet. So that was a minor disappointment about that. I’d like to do something else. I mean, we did a 10 inch. On one side was Hawkwind’s “Master of the Universe“, recited by a child. And on the other side was my very, very short story: “A Million Infant Breaths“, which is about the pope. The then Pope dying and waking up on a landscape entirely composed of all the babies that are the result of the Catholic Church’s position on abortion. It’s a charming little story. Very weird. And again, it was read out by a child who was 10 or 11 at that time. So it’s got that lovely little girl innocence as she reads the story, and Andrew did some sort of krautrock type music for it. I dunno if anyone bought it. It’s got a great cover. I love doing stuff like that. I’d like to do something else with Andrew.
I think he always seems to very much fun when he’s playing live.
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
And I, I remember talking to him ages ago when, I think in Rome, at the Post Romantic Empire festival, Current 93 played and a couple of other people. I think he was talking about that he had been approached by, I think, some Australian fans who loved his music, and they told him that they even called their dog after him. But then it turned out that when he asked him about which of his records they owned, they had only downloaded all the stuff illegally, and I think he was slightly annoyed about that.
I mean, of course it’s an honor if a dog is named after you. But you want to maybe have some money to buy a pint. I downloaded illegally a great deal of stuff by the Legendary Pink Dots. I got in touch with Edward Ka-Spel at one point and said, I love your music. I’ve downloaded a lot of your stuff illegally. It’s about time I paid for some, so how about I send you, I think it was 200 euros, and you choose what you think is the best stuff that you’ve done that I don’t already have from illegal download. And I sent it to him inside a copy of, I think, The Crimson Petal. The money was just hidden inside there. And that’s how we did it. And that felt to me like an appropriate balance. There is this very hardline position where someone says, you are stealing from the artist when you download, because if you hadn’t been able to download that album, you would’ve bought it. That’s not actually true. There are lots of things that we investigate ’cause we’re curious. If someone says that the latest, I don’t know, Jay-Z album or something is really special, I’ll think, well, I haven’t enjoyed Jay-Z stuff in the past, but maybe it is special. I might download it and then decide that actually I don’t like it. There’s no way I would’ve gone into a shop and bought it. Just out of curiosity whether it would be any good. So, yes, downloads are not strictly lost sales, but of course, if we download everything illegally, then we are also disadvantaging the artists who are producing the things that we like. So yes, I, I’ve done that a number of times where I’ve grown to really love music by a particular artist and either getting it secondhand or downloading it illegally, neither of which benefits the artist. I then make a point of buying some stuff as a kind of cosmic evening up of the balance sheet.
I saw the Legendary Pink Dots a couple of weeks ago in Cologne.
I mean, Legendary Pink Dots are extraordinary in that I really think that next month, they could produce their best album ever. And you cannot say that about many bands that have been going for 40 years. Usually there’s a tailing off of quality. As the musicians get older and more comfortable the music gets less surprising. And I think they’re still really engaged. Not all of their albums are the same quality, but they still come out with amazing things at whatever age they are.
And they and they still record and write. But this huge discography is really intimidating, I think because there are so many records. It’s a bit like if somebody now wanted to get into Current 93, it would also be a hard thing to do, I guess.
One of the implicit messages of Listen is that you’re gonna die before you get to grips with all the things that are worth listening to. And once you realize that once you let go of your illusions, that you can get it all covered, you can relax because you don’t have to listen to all the Current 93 albums because you have a life to live. The majority of people in the world will never listen to even one Current 93 album. So if you’ve listened to 45 of them, that is quite something, even from David Tibet‘s point of view. So it’s fine. It’s not a problem. The only problem is that perfectionism that people can feel, which is another kind of anxiety of, oh, there are these albums I haven’t heard. By the group that I claim to be really into. It’s not necessary to be anxious in that way because there are 350 million hours of music worth listening to. And you are going to die before too long. It’s fine. And I don’t believe that people like Edward and David are bitter or angry with people who’ve only bought 30 of their records. I think they’re very happy that somebody’s bought 30 of their records, especially if they’ve really loved and engaged with them. With these huge discographies, unless you’re Nick Drake and you make three albums and then kill yourself, once artists survive and don’t kill themselves, the number of records just does mount up and maybe too big for an individual to truly explore. It’s fine. It’s life. I do wish people wouldn’t check out Rolling Stones records though, because they really don’t need to be making records. They don’t want to be making records. They’re businessmen and they have commercial empires to run. The loyalty that people show to some of these people who are really not musicians anymore is quite mystifying to me. But again: They love that group because that group has defined them and they feel that if they didn’t check out the latest thing, they would be letting go of a part of themselves, I suppose.
I think sometimes bands that have been around so long, that in itself is for some people also a certain value because they’re still there. So we have to go and see them. Maybe also before they die or we die or whatever.
I think there’s an element of, as long as one member of the Rolling Stones is still alive, that means I’m not so old, or that I’m not dead yet.
I was wondering about Under The Skin. When people talk about books being made into films there’s often this cliché: “I’ve read the book, it’s much better. The film is crap and so on.” And I think the film was much different from your novel. In a way it is a good thing because films and novels are very different media. Some of the aesthetic choices and also the soundtrack were incredible. I’d read your novel before, then saw the film and I thought, well, this film is also great.
Did you read Under the Skin or did you read the [German translation] Weltenwanderin or whatever they called it?
No. I read Under The Skin.
I mean the comparison that I always make when people ask me about adaptations: to me the ideal adaptation is Conrad’s, Heart of Darkness being made into Apocalypse Now. That’s as good as it gets. Where the adapter really gets the heart of the darkness, but throws away everything else, and is thinking purely cinematically what’s going to work as a film. And that’s what Glazer did with Under the Skin. And I think that Glazer really got what that book was saying about alienation and about othering. And because he has gone on to make the film about Auschwitz [The Zone Of Interest] it’s very clear that that’s one of the things that really occupies him. This sense of what humans give themselves permission to do once they define the other as the other. So clearly that’s one of the things that animates him as a thinker and he found that in Under the Skin and he really got it and really brought it to life beautifully in that film while discarding almost all of the the plot elements of my novel, which was just ideal. I don’t want to go to a cinema and see a faithful, but rather crappy adaptation of my book. Where’s the joy in that?
You mentioned comics, sometimes called graphic novels, depending on what it is.
Well, actually, most really good comics artists don’t like the term graphic novels. They just like the term comics. But anyway, go on.
Yeah. It’s just like, for example, Alan Moore’s Watchmen, which is this massive thing and when they decided to turn it into a movie, they basically decided to film each panel.Trying to be identical.
I haven’t seen it and I haven’t seen League of Extraordinary Gentleman either, which apparently is also not a good film.
No, not really. I think, I think Alan Moore loathes all these films. The League of Extraordinary Gentleman was the last film of Sean Connery. I think he was also not very happy about it, but, anyway. Did you have any sci-fi authors that you were into when you were young?
Somebody I contacted before he died was Robert Sheckley, who was big in the seventies. He wrote a hilarious novel called Mind Swap, where instead of going on an intergalactic holiday, which costs an enormous amount of money, you just swap minds with someone on the other planet. But because of criminal behavior and so on, there’s actually more minds than bodies ’cause stuff happens to the bodies. It’s about this guy who finds out that his body’s gone missing and he needs to get it back. It’s good. And he wrote lots of interesting short stories, and I think he influenced me as a writer and I sent him a nice letter before he died. He was probably the most influential. Kurt Vonnegut, of course. I didn’t write to Vonnegut. I don’t think Vonnegut needed more people writing to him. There’s a book, once I’m put on the spot with names, there’s a book that was very influential on me, written by a feminist author.
Ursula Le Guin?
No, no, no, no. She was published by the Women’s Press. She was more obscure than Ursula Le Queen. See, this is another thing in my relationship with music, I’m constantly exploring new music and becoming more knowledgeable about music that I didn’t know about two weeks ago, but because I now have a 65-year-old brain, there is the danger that I will be really, really into it and, and make a CDR of it, put it on my shelf alphabetically, and then forget what the fucking artist is called and not be able to find it again. Because that recall for names is one of the things you lose when you get to be an old fart. Woman On The Edge Of Time [by Marge Piercy] was very influential on me. And the Narnia books, obviously, which I didn’t read until I was in my late teens. There’s a novel called Hothouse by Brian Aldiss, which was originally a long short story, and he expanded it into a short novel. And I read it as a long short story. I think it had won the Nova Prize or something in the seventies. That really excited me and influenced my prose style. I think I haven’t reread it for 40 years or something. My relationship with literature is similar to my relationship with music in that I don’t tend to revisit. I know there’s people that read their favorite Jane Austen novel every year, and they say it’s a different experience each time. I don’t have enough time and enough life to revisit. I will play certain Coil things repeatedly. There are certain krautrock albums that I go back to. There are albums by an Australian group called The Church that I go back to. But it’s a very small part of my listening day because I listen to music all day and most of it is either new in the sense of having been produced recently or just new to me. Never heard it before. I mean, getting back to Listen, I don’t feel that’s a superior way of listening. If somebody wants to play the same records all the time and it nourishes them and gives them joy, then lovely, and they shouldn’t feel that they have to go out and investigate whatever the latest trend is. If that’s not giving them joy, we only have a short lifetime and I hope that people will find ways to get the most out of the life that they’ve got and waste the least amount of time.
Interview: MG
Photo: Jonas Plöger
Thanks to Jonas Plöger for the photo and for providing the premises.