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BIO
Michel Faber is the author of UNDER THE SKIN and SOME RAIN MUST FALL. His work has been published in 20 countries and received several literary awards. Faber's work has been described as a combination of Roald Dahl and Franz Kafka, as Somerset Maugham shacking up with Ian McEwan. Born in the Netherlands in 1960, Faber emigrated to Australia at the age of seven and has lived in Ross-Shire, Scotland, since 1992. He has worked as a nurse, a pickle-packer, a cleaner, and a guinea pig for medical research.
PAST INTERVIEW
The title of Michel Faber's first novel, UNDER THE SKIN, is a metaphor for how, despite our differences, people are all very much the same --- and that sameness includes predilections for cruelty. While that realization will not end the world's problems, it may provide some personal solace. It might also make you reconsider your eating habits. Join Bookreporter.com's guest writer, David Soyka, as he recounts a recent conversation with the author about his novel, his own food preferences, and much more.
BRC: To what extent did your own food predilections dictate the tone of the novel? Are you a vegetarian?
MF: Human beings are by nature omnivores. Some people deny this biological fact, claiming that all our ills, such as cancer, stem from eating meat. This is nonsense. Some people, however, make a purely moral decision that they don't wish to eat other animals. This is a choice I respect enormously. Western culture's consumption of meat has reached such a pitch of gluttony that it now involves terrible cruelty to animals and alarming scientific abuses. The weird things we do in order to produce an endless supply of supermarket steak no longer bears much relation to farming as we like to imagine it. It has entered the realm of Sci-fi horror.
BRC: You've said you stopped reading science fiction back in the 1970s. Was that a conscious decision of some sort (you know, now that I'm older I can leave that juvenile stuff behind and get to "real" literature) or because you lost interest in the genre?
MF: As a kid, I read all kinds of fiction indiscriminately, out of sheer curiosity. At 15 I remember reading Jacqueline Susann, Isaac Asimov, Hammond Innes, Ngaio Marsh, anything and everything really --- along with the more "worthy" literature on the school curriculum, like D.H. Lawrence, Hardy and so on. Once I became an adult I realized that for every trashy or mediocre book I read, there was a superb and profound one I'd never get around to reading, and that I had perhaps seventy years to live. So, I made a decision only to read superb and profound books. I also stopped watching television. In recent years, my tolerance for garbage has dropped very, very low.
BRC: Do you feel any kinship with any particular writers identified as SF or fantasy authors, or do you think you're treading the same ground as Kafka, Orwell, or Huxley whose speculative social satires are "permitted" for serious readers (serious being defined as intellectual interest in something beyond beach entertainment)?
MF: I feel a kinship with any writer who strives to craft a truly fine book. I'm not inclined to worry about whether Orwell or Huxley are SF writers or not. I just try to make sure my prose is less uneven than Huxley's.
BRC: Your novel shares many of that genre's tropes (aliens from outer space being the most obvious), as well as those of horror and fantasy. Yet it is marketed as a mainstream book. Care to explore this?
MF: I would never have signed a contract with a publisher that contemplated marketing UNDER THE SKIN as science fiction. No amount of money is worth what that label inflicts on the work of a serious writer who wants to be free to use -- or not use --- science fiction or fantasy elements depending on the themes of each individual book. It's not about whether you're willing to stand up and defend sci-fi, it's about whether you're willing to sit back and watch your work being dumped in the part of the bookstore where they keep the Babylon 5 tie-ins.
In an ideal world, booksellers would put the well-written novels (whatever their content or genre) in one part of the store and the garbage (whatever its literary pretensions or lack of them) in another. But that would require the bookstore to admit that much of its stock is garbage and that many of its customers are hungry for trash --- which is no way to run a business.
BRC: You were born in the Netherlands and are not a native speaker of English, emigrated to Australia when you were seven, and now live in Scotland. That kind of personal diaspora can lend itself to the themes of alienation that show up in UNDER THE SKIN. Do you think that's true in your case, or am I over-psychoanalyzing?
MF: Of course it's true. And I love the phrase "personal diaspora."
BRC: You've worked as a nurse, pickle-packer, a cleaner and a guinea pig for medical research. Is there something to be said about writers who have "gotten their hands dirty" in the real world as opposed to those whose experience lies primarily in academic, MFA settings?
MF: For me, it's the books that are important, not the people who write them. I really don't care if Tolstoy was an aristocrat or a ditch-digger, and Dickens doesn't rise in my estimation because he had a tough childhood. I'm not convinced my own work is any better because I once had a job mopping stairs in an apartment block. I think Jeffrey Archer or Judith Krantz would possibly be enriched as human beings if they spent a few months working in a geriatric hospital, but I doubt it would make much difference to the quality of their prose.
BRC: One of the themes of UNDER THE SKIN is "interspecies insensitivity" --- meaning that despite the fact that we recognize that animals may have intelligence and feelings, even if it is a "primitive" version, being at the top of the evolutionary chain somehow entitles us to ignore it when it comes to considering how our actions affect the feelings of "lower" animals. But does a lobster really care whether he's boiled in water and eaten by some guy looking silly in his bib, or swallowed up by some denizen of the deep? Indeed, even if we knew that the lobster felt pain the way we do, even had a kind of intelligence, might death by boiling be more "humane" than getting shredded by a shark?
MF: Yes, these are complex issues, and I deliberately keep the reader's sympathies finely balanced between Isserley (the main character) and the vodsels (human beings). Ultimately, each of us has to look the moral issues in the face and figure out where we stand.
BRC: Music figures in the novel a bit. Are you a fan?
MF: I do play music when I'm writing, but it has to be mainly instrumental so I don't get distracted from the words in my head. John Adams, Coil, John Tavener, Current 93, Neu, Cluster, Miles Davis, Klaus Schulze and Bill Laswell all figure largely. Also, BBC Radio 3 (the classical station). Basically, I love all music that's composed and played with passion, wit and sincerity. Which rules out everything you're likely to find on commercial radio or MTV.
BRC: Who are your literary influences?
MF: I don't emulate any writer in particular, I pick up techniques and tangential inspirations from all over the place. John Berger's WAYS OF EEING, which is not even a novel but a book of art criticism, has had a big influence on my world view as I express it in my fiction. Avant-garde and electronic music inspires me too. Kurt Vonnegut I've admired for his moral scope and compassion. The use of allegory in medieval literature still excites me. Technically, I've learned a lot about the pacing of comic dialogue from a playful little pulp called EVERY CROOK AND NANNY by Evan Hunter. Dickens I've admired and studied closely. The King James Bible is part of my bones.
BRC: What are you currently reading?
MF: I read very little fiction nowadays, as I spend most of my time writing. I do read a lot of nonfiction for research. I might read four or five books a year. One of the last ones was a volume of short stories by Ali Smith called OTHER STORIES AND OTHER STORIES. More recently I did a review of Margaret Atwood's THE BLIND ASSASSIN shortly before it won the Booker Prize. Superb.
BRC: What's the next book about?
MF: Next book looks like it's going to be a novella called THE HUNDRED AND NINETY NINE STEPS. It wasn't supposed to be, but I was commissioned to write a short story set in Whitby and it grew to 26,000 words --- long enough to stand on its own. In the meantime I'm working on a huge Victorian novel set in the London of 1875. It's guaranteed alien-free. After that, another short story collection. I've got so much material, but the wheels of publication turn slow.
When UNDER THE SKIN took off so remarkably, I worried that my publisher, Canongate [my UK publisher], would be frustrated not being able to 'follow up' with a comparably weird, Scottish, modern tale, so I offered to lay aside the Victorian novel and write something else. Not a retread of UNDER THE SKIN, but something which would at least seem to be written by the same writer! However, Canongate reassured me that they'd get behind whatever I was most committed to writing --- and that the readership would either take it or reject it. A rare attitude for a publisher to have, but that's the big advantage of signing with an independent.
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