Michel Faber

Michel Faber’s latest novel is The Crim­son Petal & The White. We talked to him about the chal­lenges of writ­ing a Vic­to­rian novel today and the ques­tions of class at the centre of the book.

What was the gen­e­sis of the novel, where did it come from?

When I was at uni­ver­sity I stud­ied the Vic­to­rian era, and really enjoyed read­ing vic­to­rian novels, and learninig about the 19th Cen­tury in gen­eral. And, for most of my life I have lived in cir­cum­stances that other people would describe as poverty - it never really felt that way to me, because i don’t really need much to keep me going, and I was going to uni­ver­sity with people who came from back­grounds of great priv­ilige, and for me one of the things which drives The Crim­son Petal is that clash between the mar­gin­alised work­ing class anger of Sugar, and her hatred and mis­trust of wealthy people, and the real­ity of that posi­tion when you move away from poverty and realise there are some won­der­ful things about being middle class. It’s great not to be in danger of your life, and it’s great to be taken care of in cer­tain ways. That whole class con­fu­sion - that… who am I?

I’m sorry, I’m very inar­tic­u­late when I speak - I’m very artic­u­late when I write, but because I don’t have those pre­pared answers we talked about ear­lier, because it would drive me round the bend deliv­er­ing a little spiel, it does mean there’s a lot of umming and ahing and trying to think what i really mean.

Um…

I’ve always been very inter­ested in that jour­ney from a very alien­ated dam­aged past towards some­thing that’s more func­tional, more con­nected to the rest of human­ity, and that’s a very dif­fi­cult jour­ney for Sugar to make and it also involves her losing some of her iden­tity and feel­ing as if she has sold out in some way, and yet on the other hand you can under­stand why she wants to do that.

And how did that sug­gest a Vic­to­rian set­ting, and the form of a Vic­to­rian novel?

I’ve been writ­ing novels since I was a kid, and all the novels i wrote in my early teens would die after ten or forty or a hun­dred pages, because i would start them in a rush of enthu­si­asm, and i would think that that momen­tum would carry me through to the end, but i would get stuck and that novel would die. Then I got mar­ried, and my wife was also a nov­el­ist - my first wife - and she wrote novels in the same way, start­ing in a rush of enthu­si­asm and hoping that would pull her through, and she got stuck as well, and had ter­ri­ble trou­ble, and i was watch­ing her strug­gling. even­tu­ally I decided that there had to be a better way of writ­ing a novel than this, and decided to write a Vic­to­rian novel, that was com­pletely planned out, like a piece of well laid archi­tec­ture or some­thing, very neat, and every­thing at the start would reflect some­thing at the end. I would know exactly what hap­pened to every char­ac­ter, and when and where. I had this immensely com­pli­cated plan writ­ten up for it, vir­tu­ally down to the para­graphs in the chap­ters. And it worked because i fin­ished it. The orig­i­nal ver­sion of it was very neat, and the world view was very grim, very deter­min­is­tic. Sugar, in the orig­i­nal ver­sion, dies a grisly death at the end. You know how at the start of the book there’s a cab crash with blood on the cob­ble­stones, at the end of the book she died in a cab crash with blood on the cob­ble­stones, so there was this whole idea that our fate is writ­ten in the stars and we have to live through this sort of cir­cu­lar scheme. When I grew older, and lived a lot more, and got together with my second wife, and gen­er­ally became more light spir­ited and more con­nected with soci­ety, I couldn’t in all con­science have the novel that grim and that mean spir­ited, so i re-​wrote it, twice. The third time that i rewrote it i gave the char­ac­ters a lot of free­dom. I thought, ‘I’ll give Sugar a chance, and see what she does with it.’ I didn’t know whether she would live or die, but it turns out taht she lives. And again, in the first ver­sion William Rack­ham is a com­plete shit, a com­plete, utter buf­foon, and Sugar hates him from start to finish, there’s no idea that her rela­tion­ship with him is any­thing other than exploita­tive and hate­ful. And I think life isn’t like that. Even between sugar dad­dies and pros­ti­tutes, things get con­fused, there’s a mutual depen­dence, a weird affec­tion, people get used to each other… I thought it would be more true to life to have it that way.

Did the set­ting come from this deci­sion to plot it so care­fully, in a Vic­to­rian way?

It was partly that, partly that I was study­ing a lot of Vic­to­rian novels at the time. It was also partly that I like… Have you read any of my other books?

No, I’m afraid I haven’t.

I’ve writ­ten this book called Under The Skin, which is almost a thriller, set on the A9 in Scot­land, about a weird woman who picks up male hitch-​hikers. That’s a very dif­fer­ent book from this. And i’ve writ­ten a couple of novel­las writ­ten in a very spare style, with no words wasted. I like that, and i like to do that, but on the other hand i like writ­ing prose taht is very descrip­tive, very rich. It’s dif­fi­cult to get away with that nowa­days, because Amer­i­can thrillers have had such an influ­ence on what people think good prose is - every­thing is meant to be stripped down to the bone. I think Stephen King was quoted as saying, ‘Adverbs are your enemy - this whole idea that you should remain utterly simple. I think some­times it’s good to have a big sump­tu­ous meal of prose and really get lost in it, to have all the pic­tures put on for you, not having to imag­ine them for your­self, but to have them cre­ated by the writ­ing. I thought if i did that in a Vic­to­rian novel, then people wouldn’t com­plain, because that’s what you expect in a Vic­to­rian novel.

I very much got the impres­sion it must have been great fun to be writ­ing like that…

Oh yes! It was fan­tas­tic fun to write! I read inter­views with writ­ers some­times, where they com­plain about what hell it is to be a writer. [laughs] I can’t under­stand that, it’s the best job on earth.

Was there an awful lot of research involved though? One thing that really leapt out for me was these little deta­ials about the lives of Vic­to­rian pros­ti­tutes, things like that, and from what you’ve been saying it took a long time to write - was it one of these all con­sum­ing projects?

I did an enour­mous amount of research, but didn’t actu­ally use a lot of it. I don’t know if you’ve read manuy his­tor­i­cal novels, but I’ve read some where I’ve been really pissed off by the writer des­per­ately trying to let me know that they know some­thing. They’ve put the work in, they’ve done the research, and you’re bloody well going to know that they’ve expended the labour on it. I made sure that when you read The Crim­son Petal, you get just enough to give you a vivid pic­ture, but it would never bog it down, so that the nar­ra­tive would be moving along swiftly. I know that’s hard to believe given that it’s such a huge book, but i think that it’s char­ac­ter driven all the way, it moves. I don’t know how it got so long. Maybe I’m fool­ing myself, but i don;t think there’s any of that ‘Let’s pause here for some his­tor­i­cal stuff.’

Well, there isn’t mas­sive amounts of detail about Vic­to­rian door­knobs or what­ever. When I was given the book to read before the inter­view, I sort of looked at it and thought… oh dear, it’s vast, but then it almost skipped along once I picked it up.

A lot of people have that response. They see the size of it, which is why there’s taht joke at the start where the pros­ti­tute says that you didn’t realise the size of me before you picked me up. When people get started, though, they do get through it, and they do enjoy it. Quite a few people have said to me that they reached the end and wanted more. That’s quite flattering.

With that little joke at the start, some­thing I was inter­ested in talk­ing about is the nar­ra­tor. I seems like every time you get involved in what’s going on, you’re pulled out of it, reminded that you are read­ing a book. What was the idea behind that trick?

That’s less so as the book goes on…

Yeah, but it’s def­i­nitely there, and… jarring…

Once you really start get­ting involved with Sugar and Agnes and Sophie and so on, I think there’s more of a sense that you are really part of the family, that you are living with them. In the early part of the book, before you’ve really got to know these people, I do really rub it in that you are a stranger, that you don’t know these people. Every book offers you this illu­sion taht you just pick it up, and you know every­thing, so it was fun to sub­vert that illusion.

Uh-​huh. I guess what i noticed was that a Vic­to­rian nar­ra­tor would nor­mally remind you of his pres­ence, would be there, but you have him offer choices to the reader…

In the first ver­sion of the book the nar­ra­tor was a lot more know-​it-​all, but I thought it might be more true to life to have him be your guide but be unre­li­able. Like, ‘I’m going to take care of you, but, oh, by the way, I have to go now.’ There are a lot of tac­tics in the book that are designed to keep the reader engaged and inter­ested. I’m very aware that in a book this big, if you don’t stay aware of what the reader needs or wants as tehy go through, then they’ll get bored, or start find­ing it heavyy going. Even though I’m a very seri­ous writer, I don’t ike the idea of big worthy books taht people have on tehir shelf because it was nom­i­nated for the Booker or some­thing, and they read 11 pages and think, ‘Well, this is all very inter­est­ing, but I’m not really smart enough for this, I’ll read this some other time, like when I’m old.’ If a book’s going to be big, it’s got to be really grip­ping and engaging.

One thing I thought when read­ing it, was ‘That’s a cool device, but it’s really start­ing to get on my nerves!’

Yeah, I knew that it would get on people’s nerves if it kept going like that…

I’m not sure what I’m trying to say, here. I sup­pose, like you say you’re very con­cerned with making the book read­able, but that sort of trick­ing and play­ing around with the reader, even alien­at­ing them - was that some­thing you wanted to do? I don’t mean that you meant to do that in any sort of mali­cious way, but…

It’s acknowl­edg­ing that it’s dif­fi­cult to get to know people, I think. It’s dif­fi­cult to get access to people phys­i­cally and emo­tion­ally, and so there are obsta­cles in your way if you want to get to know these char­ac­ters. But once you’ve got your little foothold, or found your first person to latch onto, then it gets easier. In a way that reflects what hap­pens with Sugar. In the same way that you get a little grip on one char­ac­ter as a reader, you have a foothold in that world, and it’s not so tricky, for Sugar, once she has a little foothold in the Rack­ham family, things get easier for her.

So your mir­ror­ing the expe­ri­ence of the char­ac­ters in the writing?

Yeah.

When it comes to the char­ac­ters, all the char­ac­ters, for me anyway, there isn’t anyone that you can really root for…

It depends, some people adore Sugar. And some people really feel for Agnes, which sur­prised me, because I would have though people would just want to slap her across the face, repeat­edly! I sup­pose they iden­tify with her being so trapped.

That’s what I mean. With Agnes, I was half, ‘God, pull your­self together woman!’ and half full of sym­pa­thy with her being stck in this hideous posi­tion. Or with William Rack­ham, he’s a total idiot a lot of the time, but… I liked him, at the begin­ning at least. It struck me that you empha­sised the fact that every­one is a bit… grubby.

Every­one is a bit grubby, but on the other hand, they are all des­per­ate to tran­scend, to leave their damage behind and fly up and be some­thing better. I think we are all like that, and I think the book is very respect­ful of that journey.

I think… It’s not that you can’t follow along with the char­ac­ters, but every­one is a bit repulsive.

I don’t know, do you find Eme­line Fox repulsive?

Erm, well, no… not repul­sive, but I never became fully attached to her, or anyone, but I was empathis­ing and sym­pa­this­ing with every­one with­out liking them. Even the minor char­ac­ters, like the two writer who keep pop­ping back up…

That’s inter­est­ing. It may be that you’d have a sim­i­lar response to Under The Skin. In that this woman picks up tehse male hitch-​hikers on the A9 and does fairly awful things to them, and in that novel I delib­er­ately keep people’s sym­pa­thies on a knife edge. So, as soon as you start feel­ing for the hitch-​hikers, I’ll give you a par­tic­u­larly hor­ri­ble guy, so you think these people are scum, so you’ll feel for her, but then I’ll have her do some­thing par­tic­u­larly rep­re­hen­si­ble. It’s that bal­anc­ing of sym­pa­thy and repulsion.

I mean, I sup­pose, that in a novel of this sort, you tend to latch onto some­one and cheer them on from the side­lines, but with this book I didn’t. Did you?

Well, every char­ac­ter in this book is me, so they’re all aspects of me, so in taht sense i want them all to get what they want. That yearn­ing taht they all have to tran­scend, to become hap­pier and better people, taht’s very close to my own heart. A lot of read­ers are pas­sion­ate about Sugar. One of the people work­ing for my Amer­i­can pub­lisher came to my editor and said, ‘You’ve got to tell me - is Sugar going to be alright?’ As is my editor would know! There is that sense of want­ing to know how things turn out for her.

Yeah, I see how with Sugar being right at the center, she is the char­ac­ter you are meant to be root­ing for. I mean, is that how you see it? Is she a heroine?

I don’t really believe in heros or hero­ines in that sense… I’m very aller­gic to the whole Hol­ly­wood ethos, as you can prob­a­bly gather. I think each one of us could be described by a third party as either a won­der­ful human being or a grubby little shit, depend­ing on what lihght they had seen us in, or how theyt were dis­posed to us. I think taht’s human real­ity, and I respect that in the char­ac­ters. Sadly, I think a lot of us are dam­aged, and Sugar is dam­aged, and so is William. No one in the book has had good par­ent­ing, all the par­ents are dead or absent or really awful, like Mrs. Cast­away. So… taht’s another thing that runs through the book, people are look­ing for some­one to take care of them. I think the New York Times review as a sugar daddy…

It’s a good pun…

Well, it is, but ‘sugar daddy’ isn’t in my vocab­u­lary - is it an Americanism?

Yeah, I think so.

It’s a very appro­pri­ate pun, she is look­ing for that.

You say that all the char­ac­ters are aspects of your­self, and there are these themes, so… is it autobiographical?

It’s the most auto­bi­o­graph­i­cal, which sounds bizarre because it’s a Vic­to­rian novel set in 1875, but… I think that idea of being very alien­ated, being on the mar­gins of soci­ety, and look­ing at all those middle class people, those con­nected people, and saying ‘I hate you all, I despise every­thing you stand for!’ That was very much me when I was 18 years old. That energy you get from anger and from pit­ting your­self against every­thing that is con­ven­tional and benign, it isn’t enough to get you through life. Even­tu­ally you do want to be more con­nected, and accepted. You don’t have the energy any more to hate, to rail against every­thing. That ten­sion is very much in the book.

Were you map­ping out those ideas in the book as they came up for you?

Yeah, the expe­ri­ence that Sugar has in the book mir­rors the growth that i had over the 20 years that i wrote dif­fer­ent ver­sions of it.

Um… I wish I was one of those jour­nal­ists who has all their ques­tions writ­ten out in advance! Um…

Well, you can be silent for a while.

Um, well, I’m not sure how to ask this. Since we’re talk­ing about auto­bi­o­graph­i­cal things… I know you’re per­haps not overly keen on talk­ing about your life as was, but people do want to read about it… so, how much has your - i don’t know the word for this - uncon­ven­tional life informed this book?

Um, um (long pause) There’s one experience… I’ve been reluc­tant to bring this up, because in a sense, I worry that it would be naff to be bring­ing this up in an inter­view with the Big Issue…

Right…

It might sound like i might be tai­lor­ing what i say for the rader­ship of the Big Issue. I did spend a short time home­less in London, in the early 80s. My first wife and i did try to emi­grate to Eng­land, but we didn’t manage to find work or acco­mo­da­tion, and had to go back to Aus­tralia with our tails between our legs. I had neglected to get a re-​entry stamp for my pass­port, so when we got to Heathrow, they just didn’t let me go. Appar­ently, if Heathrow lets you go to another coun­try, and they aren’t obliged to take you, then Heathrow has to pay the cost of depor­ta­tion. That’s how it works. So I had to get this re-​entry stamp, and was stuck in London. Not for very long, but I spent that week sleep­ing in parks, and in doss-​houses with skin­heads and so on. Of course this was in the Thatcher era, so there was a very sharp divi­sion between the haves and the have nots, sharper than now. I wouldn’t exchange that expe­ri­ence for any­thing. It was dif­fi­cult but very con­struc­tive. I think that expe­ri­ence of the strug­gle of sur­viv­ing, of find­ing a place to sleep, find­ing some­thing to eat, does inform that early part of the novel. (long pause) I think also the fury that Sugar has against the ruling classes, and that she’s going to blow the lid off every­thing with her novel. This novel that’s going to take revenge on behalf of the work­ing classes… that’s some­thing I was fuelled by. It was always such a weird mix. On the one hand i had that anger and that alien­ation, but on the other I went to uni­ver­sity and was read­ing books all the time, and not living… what i would con­sider a grim exis­tance. I mean… it’s hard to talk about. Because i don’t drink or smoke or take drugs, or have expen­sive objects that i want, all i really need is a roof over my head and enough food to eat, and that’s acheiv­able if you have any sort of job, or if you are on the dole. Even if by other people’s stan­dards i was poor, i always felt com­fort­ably off. I’m con­fused about this. I’m sorry I’m being so inar­tic­u­late about all this. I think, beca­sue i grew up in aus­tralia where there isn’t so much of a class soci­ety, I was about 20 years old before i fig­ured out i was work­ing class. I had always thought that if you read lots of books and stayed in school that meant you were work­ing class. It was only when i grew older and people asked what my par­ents did - my mother worked in a fac­tory and my father worked in a car spare parts place - that i realised, ‘Oh,gee, i must be work­ing class.’ I guess in Britain you already know by the time you are 8 years old or some­thing. Maybe you do in Aus­tralia too, but i was just so out of it…

Right. From the inter­views I’ve read with you, the potted biog­ra­phy I’ve picked up… these char­ac­ter is in the book are out­siders, they are chang­ing their sur­round­ings. Even William say, he’s an outsider…

Well, he thinks he’s an outsider…

‘Outsiderness’ though, suf­fuses every­thing in there, in the book…

Well, I was taken away from Hol­land, against my will, when I was seven, and taken to Aus­tralia, and even though I’m very happy that I grew up there. I got a very good edu­ca­tion there, and socially it was a very good place to grow up, it’s a more socially enlight­ened, more fem­i­nist sort of place that Great Britain, I believe… but still, it didn’t feel like my home. I was des­per­ately unhappy with the weather! I’m a real snow and rain person. So I felt like an alien there, and of course now I’m in Scot­land, I don’t fit in here either. Scot­land has been very good to me as an author, but i cer­tainly don’t feel Scot­tish. It’s weird - when i read from one of my books which has Scot­tish accents in it, I can’t do the accents. I’ve writ­ten it, but i can’t even deliver it, that’s how dis­as­so­ci­ated I am. I can do a cock­ney pros­ti­tute accent pretty well! That’s the only one i can do. Sorry, how did we get onto that?

Being detached. Sorry, I hate this - I don’t know you, this is stuff that I’ve picked up from clip­pings - but there are these themes in the book, no necce­sar­ily the class thing, but that all the char­ac­ters in the novel, they are sep­a­rated from where they want to be, or they are sep­a­rated from someone…

But aren’t we all sep­a­rated from where we want to be?

Um, you do meet these impos­si­bly happy people… What I’m trying to get at is… I’ve read about your per­sonal his­tory, things that you have gone through…

One of the things that i always keep coming back to in all my fic­tion is that as soon as you get to know some­one a little bit, more than just saying hello to them in the street, you already start to realise how weird they are. I have this theory that there is no normal, there are no con­ven­tional, happy, well adjusted people out there. Some people can play that role more con­vinc­ingly, but under the sur­face, people are as weird as hell, just bizarre. I’m con­fi­dent that if i got to know you for six months say, you would be an extremely bizarre char­ac­ter, and that every­body is.

Ha, yeah. I’m alarmed by anyone who isn’t… I guess, from what i’ve read, per­haps your life… Sorry, I never like doing this psy­cho­an­a­lyt­i­cal approach to read­ing someone’s novel, I mean, it’s a work of the imag­i­na­tion. But i think i have to ask…

It is a work of the imag­i­na­tion, and i’m a highly delib­er­ate wri­eter. Every­thing I allow to stay in my work in the final draft is there for a damn good reason. It’s there because i’ve been able to jus­tify to myself what it’s doing there, what pur­pose it’s serv­ing there. There’s noth­ing that’s there just because I have a bee in my bonnet about some­thing or because it hap­pened to me, so i have to revisit it. I’m not that kind of writer, I’m a crafter and a story-teller…

I guess because of the way the book is… never mind. From what you just said, was it a dif­fi­cult book to write?

I wrote about 150 pages of it, and then my life got very stress­fula and com­pli­cated. My mar­riage fell apart. All the menial jobs that i had been doing to sup­port myself dried up. I had been work­ing as a cleaner, and the work got very unre­li­able, so i decided i needed a reg­u­lar job that i could depend on, so i trained to be a nurse, and nursed for a number of years. Of course when you are work­ing you have less time to write, so it was quite a while before i could get back to the book. Once my life was more sorted I wrote the book very quickly and i wrote about ten pages a day, no, sorry, ten pages a week..

I was going to say!

Num­bers are not my strong point. Once the first ver­sion was fin­ished it was sheer plea­sure all the way. You have this thing that already exists, and you just have to fix it and tinker with it. It’s as if some­one else has writ­ten it for you, like a pre­vi­ous self, and they say, ‘What can you do with this?’ I find that enor­mous fun.

The pol­ish­ing and the tweak­ing, that takes the longer time?

Yes, yes. It’s won­der­ful to get up in the morn­ing and know what’s wait­ing for you, what you have to be get­ting on with. It’s just… ideal. Most people who’ve got jobs don’t enjoy them very much, so if you’ve got a job that you enjoy very much and every day you have dif­fer­ent chal­lenges, you know that you’re in charge, and you know that you are up to the challenges… I can’t think of any better way to spend your time…

Posted at 5pm on 12/01/03 by Jack Mottram to the interviews category.
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