Michel Faber, by the award-winning biographer of Alasdair Gray, is the first ever assessment of Michel Faber’s life and work across genre and form. Drawing on detailed interviews with the author, it explores as-yet-unseen archives and includes interrogation of unpublished works as well as deep dives into Faber’s most celebrated works. In this blog post, author Rodge Glass shares the details of his writing process and of his relationship with Faber himself.
Some books fall out in a rush. Some happen by accident. My book on Michel Faber happened, in stages, over about twenty years. I’m glad it took so long.
When I first realised what I wanted to be, I was a teenager. Back then I only imagined writing fiction, though almost as soon as I started writing seriously, I realised my main skill was portraiting the lives of others. Within months of my first novel being published (No Fireworks, Faber & Faber, 2005) I was working on a biography of the great Glaswegian polymath Alasdair Gray, who I worked for as secretary for several years when I was a young man. In a sense, this was my writer’s education. Typing what Gray told me to. Seeing how he worked. Observing his ways and processes, up close. Gray never learned to type, so he paced about the room, talking off the top of his head, then examining the computer screen, close up, ordering me with a grin to move this or that word around, explaining why. My book on Gray (Alasdair Gray: A Secretary’s Biography, Bloomsbury, 2008), was a mixture of an analysis of the life and works interspersed with a series of portraits of the writer, which suggested the nature of the man. It transformed my working life, and continues to even now. In the fifteen years since, I’ve spent a lot of my working life writing the lives of others, but I’ve never written another biography. Sometimes folk would ask me if I had anyone else in mind, but I found it hard to imagine another set of circumstances where I’d be interested enough in a single writer’s life to want to repeat the trick. Also, with Gray I had access to aspects of his life and work that I couldn’t imagine ever having again. I had looked up to him as a kind of eccentric, extraordinary, grandfatherly inspiration. So, I didn’t ever attempt another biography.
I did, though, have other writers whose work I loved, and from 2001 I was a huge fan of Michel Faber. What appealed to me about Faber’s work, though I couldn’t have articulated this at the time, was how much it ranged across genre and literary approach, with often extreme landscapes being the backdrop for stories which were delivered in radically different ways, but which always seemed to contain a familiar element. That is: all his stories seemed soaked in compassion. No matter the Faber story – long or short, contemporary or historical, realist or science-fiction – the concerns felt, on some level, recognizable to me. And I wanted to interrogate that, in my own way.
Sometimes, we are drawn to writers who speak to the way we already see the world, or who suggest, through their work, a way we might want to see the world. I fell for Faber’s work because it seemed to always concern the attempt to make emotional connections, even when connections seemed almost impossible. That says as much about me as it does my subject, but it is what drew me to early short stories like ‘Fish’ and ‘Some Rain Must Fall’, to novels like Under the Skin and The Crimson Petal and the White. Unlike Gray, who accidentally became a key part of my life when I was young, I did not know Faber personally at all, and for a long time I didn’t feel qualified to say anything about him. But then the 1st Michel Faber Conference was set for the summer of 2017 at the University of the Highlands & Islands, close to the A9 road where Faber’s contemporary Scottish classic, Under the Skin, was set. The organisers welcomed creative as well as critical responses to Faber’s work. I wrote one of each, and at the conference I gave a reading of a story called ‘In Separate Time’, a piece I’d set in the world of Faber’s The Book of Strange New Things. That day I was quite stunned to find Michel Faber himself on the front row, ever so politely making occasional contributions to the debate about his work across the various sessions of the conference. He was unusually direct, unflinching in his observations, which reminded me of Alasdair Gray. He was humble and self-aware, and seemed to consider his own views on his work just one part of a bigger conversation he had no interest in controlling. Rather, he seemed genuinely curious. Genuinely open-minded. Not the least bit defensive about his work, but also full or confidence when it came to discussing how it was put together, and why he had taken this or that path over his writing life. This appealed to me, as did his approach to working through his recent grief, and I started to wonder what a book about his work might look like. Also, whether I might be the person to write it.
Over time, we began writing to each other, and I explained what I wanted to do. This didn’t seem crazy, as the papers from the conference about his work were being collected in Michel Faber: Critical Essays (Gylphi, 2020), and there was growing academic interest in his writing – though no one had attempted a look across the life and work yet. Would he mind, I asked, if I tried? I’d just read Prof. Ailsa Cox’s book on Alice Munro in the Writers & Their Work series and ordered the one on Iris Murdoch, to get a sense of what might be possible, discussing with my editor Christabel Sciafe how a Faber book in this series might work. A theme started to emerge in my re-readings of Faber’s books – that of compassion in writing stories, and how this might be seen as a uniting force in an oeuvre that otherwise might seem disparate. Hard to explain, hard to understand.
What I carried from the Gray book into the Faber one was a keenness to include the writer in the conversation about their work, while remaining independent. This book, like my previous one, picks a subject I am openly admiring of – if not admiring of all the work, then certainly I’m an advocate for the work overall. (There are many writers I don’t rate. Life is short! I choose not to write books about them) Faber’s approach is distinct. I think it has value and can withstand the kind of rigorous academic interrogation it has not had before. I think Faber is one of the finest fiction writers of these islands over the last fifty or so years. And I think it’s his approach to compassionate storytelling that marks him out.
The approach of including the writer in the conversation led to the defining work of this book, which was a series of ongoing interviews via email, back and forth, over several years, with the author. When he felt like it, or when I had a question to ask, Faber wrote to me at length in what I came to recognise as his familiar style. Not uniquely a style he only used with me – so many others have reported his way of writing – though it was especially valuable to someone in my position. Many of those in the long-established Writers & their Work series are either unreachable to critics or else long dead. What excites me about the books on contemporary writers now being added to the series is that they can engage with the makers of that work. The writers themselves need not be the dominating voice, but they can be one among many. I did not always agree with what Faber had to say about his own work, but he always made me think about my own assumptions. He always had something to say I could learn from.
Often, Faber sent me resources, unbidden, through the ether. Once, an unpublished early novel, a precursor to The Book of Strange New Things. Once, an informal database of all his 90s short stories – where they were submitted and published, who rejected them, their multiple drafts. I also had access to Faber’s file in the Canongate Archives at the University of Dundee, an essential help. Along with all this, I interviewed Faber’s key editor at Canongate, Judy Moir, about editorial processes and her time at Canongate when Faber was first coming through – and generally I tried to add to the primary research out there on Faber, rather than simply replicate it for students and fans. I hope the approach makes for an engaging book, a welcoming, open door into the work of one of our very finest living writers, who shows us readers the value of reaching out for connection – even when, especially when, genuine connection seems almost impossible.
Rodge Glass
Rodge Glass is Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing at the University of Strathclyde. His previous publications include Alasdair Gray: A Secretary’s Biography (2008), Dougie’s War: A Soldier’s Story (2010), the novels No Fireworks (2005), Hope for Newborns (2008) and Bring Me the Head of Ryan Giggs (2013) and the short stories LoveSexTravelMusik: Stories for the EasyJet Generation (2013).
Find out more about Michel Faber on the Liverpool University Press website.
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