Rodge Glass on Michel Faber
by Cynthia Rogerson
Michel Faber and his then girlfriend Eva Youren left Melbourne to live in Easter Ross-shire in 1993. They settled on Tarbet farm near Portmahomack with Eva’s two sons. In 1996 Michel, who’d always written but never submitted, started winning competitions. The rest is history. Michel is now one considered an international literary star. Professor Rodge Glass of Glasgow University has written a fascinating book about Michel as part of the Writers and their Work series.
Rodge, how would you describe this biography? Primarily an academic look at his texts? Or how personal events impact on/rise out of the writing process? Or?
The focus of the book is mostly on the work – as I think the work deserves more time and detailed attention than it has had so far. This is the first full book that looks right across Faber’s oeuvre. For any writer there is always an element of the life impacting on the work, and I do concentrate on some important practical elements – Michel’s move from The Hague to Australia, for example, then his move to Scotland, and the ways in which he first got those crucial early breakthroughs. The way he reacted against his upbringing. His partner of 26 years Eva is critical to the story too, both as an editor and also as the subject of Undying – so there’s bound to be some crossover, as the work invites that. But what fascinated me most was the common threads between Michel’s various works, and I think my main contribution here is to interrogate that connection. Though I am determined to be rigorous and careful, I don’t write in an ‘academic’ way. I try to use simple, clear language, and get to any potential readers who might be interested in the topic.
Who do you envision as your audience? English Lit students? General public?
Good question! My answer might have been different a few months ago, but I can already see the work is getting a broader readership than I expected. This book is part of a series called Writers & Their Work, which has been running since 1955. Most of the writers who get a book in the series are safely long dead! And some are canonical. There are recent exceptions – Alice Munro, Kazuo Ishiguro, one on Don Peterson’s work – but largely the idea of the series was to act as an introduction to students and fans of the work, across maybe English Lit students and some members of the curious public. My approach is quite different. Including the writer in the conversation. Including unpublished works, primary research, archive access, all that. Mine isn’t a skip through the research that’s already out there, rather it’s a case for Faber’s stories as having a clear emotional territory, a clear compassionate approach, drawing on unseen sources for that. At the Edinburgh Festival, Michel’s fans came out in droves for an event discussing this book, showing me there are fans of his who are genuinely curious about how the work is made and what its legacy is. I’ve been doing book festivals recently and some media as well. Even the reviews we’ve had have gone way beyond what I’d expect for a wee book like this, and none of the interviews have even touched on how Michel’s work is studied. It’s all about the enduring value of the work, and what it’s made up of. In Scotland in particular, though internationally too, there’s a genuine and wide-ranging interest. So I think I’d say ‘General public’ after all! That’s who the book is for.
When were you first drawn to Faber’s work? Why?
The first book of Michel’s I read was The Hundred and Ninety-Nine Steps, the haunting, multi-genre novel set in Whitby, by the steps of the Abbey. That was over 20 years ago, and then I read everything, some of which I bought from the Waterstone’s bookshop I worked in as a student. My interest has grown steadily since then. I think we writers tend to be drawn to other writers who explore elements of experience that we are already looking for, or already interested in. What attracted me to Alasdair Gray’s work as a young man was his socially conscious outlook, his generosity of spirit and lack of pomposity or sense of self-importance as a writer. I was already looking for those things in an experienced writer I could learn from, and so it’s no coincidence that I ended up writing about him. With Michel, I was coming out an extremely difficult, traumatic period of my life in which I was desperately looking for consolation in storytelling that showed me how we might use compassionate approaches to connect more with each other. Michel has said himself that what interests him is writing about how valiantly human beings search for connection with others, even when that connection is almost or entirely impossible. I needed something to connect with. I was writing a painful memoir at the time this book came along, and I saw an opportunity for Faber’s work to selfishly cope with my own life, haha! (I’m half joking here. But not really…)
Faber’s style is most often very simple and disarming, not clever or complex – and yet his ideas and characters have the power to engage readers from a wide range of backgrounds, intellectual and easy-readers alike. How would you describe his writing from a literary perspective? From a non-academic perspective? Any difference when you read him simply for pleasure?
Interesting question. It is simple and disarming, you’re right. It refuses to look away, even when that would be easier. It’s unflinching. It uses simple small words and is soaked in compassion. Even when writing stories about what the consequences of a lack of compassion for others leads to – Under the Skin, for example – what’s under the stories is that outlook, which influences the selection of every phrase, every word. That’s the closest I can come to describing from a literary perspective, but even that is led by emotion, as for me, reading Faber is an emotional experience. You can enjoy seeing those connections across radically different stories and that’s intellectually my idea of fun! You see how he hops genre and form but consistently explores the same issues again and again, in different ways. But the emotional comes first for me. It also does for him, in the writing process. He starts not with a character, structure or genre, but rather starts with the emotional impact he wants to have on readers, then makes all his other decisions after that one. Very uncommon.
Do you feel living at Tarbet influenced his writing? Living in Scotland in general? If so, how?
Living in Scotland was crucial to Michel publishing at all. He had been writing furiously for 20 years and more before even arriving here, but just did so for himself – for ‘the God of literature’. It was his partner Eva who persuaded him to let that go and just try. To think of readers, too. He won three writing competitions in Scotland, was picked up by Canongate Books. He won awards as a Scottish writer ‘by formation’ and has often been included, quite rightly, I think. We contribute to the places where we are, as long as we’re there. Nothing about being born elsewhere or leaving for elsewhere should stop this, in my view. I could write a very long answer here! But also clearly Tarrel Farm where he lived in the 90s was crucial as it became the haunting Ablack Farm in Under the Skin. And his life in the years living in Fearn Station House that were the crucial years of his breakthrough success. None of which would have happened if Eva had not supported him to give up working in the nearby old folks home as a nurse and give his writing a go.
Faber (Australian, Dutch, Scottish) describes himself as a having no nationality. Do you think his diverse identity feeds into his writing?
Yes. I think he’s truly transnational, though I’m not keen on that particular word. It just means you have been made by different places. But so much of his fiction in particular is about outsider ‘aliens’ who arrive in a place that seems impossible to live in, though the protagonist must try. Faber did this several times in his own life. He appeared at an Australian primary school with not a word of English as a seven year old. These things make a difference to your outlook on the world. Which then influences the stories you tell.
The blurb at the start of your book is from Faber, describing the essential tragedy of everyone seeing themselves as odd….a paradox. He mentions commonality and specialness. His books almost always have a main character who feels alienated, the odd one out – is he saying that this sense of isolation is a delusional vanity? Do you agree that everyone feels equally weird, but is in fact normal because we all feel weird? How does this theory play out in his work?
No, I don’t think alienation or sense of isolation is a delusional vanity, in Faber’s view. Rather, he’s saying, this is how we feel, and that feeling is real – and yet, and yet! We all have so much in common! Storytelling is a reminder that opposites, or seeming opposites, can exist at the same time. Yes, we are all unique outsiders. Yes, none of us are typical. But yes, we still have things in common. What I love about Michel’s work is his insistence on looking for that commonality. We spend far too much time categorising ourselves as separate from each other as human beings. Identity is essential and undeniable. It has a huge impact on who we are, what we experience, what we see, on our privilege or otherwise. But it’s not everything. Michel’s work forces us to look for what we have in common with each other. I’m as soft as a marshmallow, so that kind of thing appeals to me. But the work is not soft at all.
Overall, what do you think Faber’s work contributes to the canon of Scottish literature?
I think it’s a huge contribution. I think his finest short stories and novels written here should be seen not exclusively in a Scottish context, but can contribute to our understanding of Scottish literature in an open-minded way. Michel was the first non-Scottish-born writer to win the Saltire for Fiction, and that has now become commonplace, as we are generally more open than we used to be in terms of categorising writers by their nationality. Michel is integral to the story of Scottish literature from the early 1990s to 2016 when he left Scotland – and that work lives on, no matter where he sleeps at night. Under the Skin alone is a huge contribution to the literature (and landscape) of Scotland, I think. In my view it’s one of the finest Scottish novels of the last half century or so. And there have been a lot of good ones!
Michel Faber – Writers and their Work – by Rodge Glass is published by Liverpool University Press (2023) is currently available in hardback for £26.40 from the publisher
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