MICHEL FABER : Malice in Wonderland...

-Some history, for starters: you were born in Holland, and then spent a lot of time in Australia : was it by choice, by obligation or for family relocation?

-MF : My parents wanted to make a clean slate, a new beginning, because they had had a lot of grief in their past : they were both traumatized by the war, my father has a lot of guilt because he fought in the wrong army, the German army, and my mother also had enduring damage from her experience during the war ; and then, they had both been married to other partners before, had children from those marriages and those marriages ended very bitterly and dramatically. They wanted to close the door on the past, on their other children, on the war, and start something new, completely fresh. They took the child from their marriage, which was me, to Australia. And, of course, they took over all their grief, their guilt, their shame and their suffering with them !

-Now you live in Scotland : why this choice ?

-MF : I wasn’t seduced, my wife was, my second wife : she was travelling around Europe, in 1991 or something, and met a photographer, who described the farm where he lived, and she said that sounded beautiful. He said it was beautiful and invited her to visit him, and she did, and she fell in love with the farm, which is the farm that is described in the book (‘Under the skin’) and she decided that we must spend the rest of her life on this farm. So we emigrated there, without having any family, job, or connection with Scotland, just to be in that place, and we lived there for seven years. Then, the farm was sold and destroyed : what you experience in ‘Under the skin’ doesn’t exist anymore, it’s knocked to the ground, it’s now very neat, with grass. The buildings have been destroyed, the fences are gone. It’s sad. My wife was heartbroken, because she loved that place so much. She hoped that we could be there forever, but I knew that it would end, because I knew the farmer wanted to sell it, because it was falling to pieces and was very old. So, one of the reasons I wrote ‘Under the skin’ is to remember, immortalize it for me. But we still live in Scotland, we moved about seven miles away from the farm, and we live now in a railway station (Michel show me a picture of the place). It’s very remote.

-And do you like it, to live in the country, far the cities ?

-MF : I can claim my solitude wherever I am, I can be alone in a city, and there is a beautiful part of the world. But if my wife says tomorrow, let’s go to Italy or Hungary or else, we’ll just go !

-How did you come to writing ?

-MF : As a child, I was a voracious reader, I read everything I could find, the whole school library, literature, shit, anything, good and mediocre books, great books. I was the sort of person you couldn’t stop, I had to read the side of a sugar packet or a bottle : if it was a text, I had to read it. But nowadays I don’t read that much...

-Because you write ?

-MF : Yes, I’m taking out instead of taking in ! I do have time to read, but now, if I have free time, I would spend it with music, because I’m so fascinated with music and so in love with it, and there’s something that I can have a relationship with when I’m writing. What I like to do is use music as a way of insuring that my text works harder. It’s difficult to explain. For example, some people, when they are writing a very sentimental passage will play sentimental music, to put themselves in the mood, or for horrific passages, they will play gloomy and frightening music :I don’t do that, because I think the risk when people do that is that the room they’re working in would be full of this atmosphere, and they would imagine that this atmosphere is in the text, when nearly in the room with them. So, when I was writing the ‘Crimson Petal...’, I was constantly playing Miles Davis from his electric music from 1970’s, jazz rock, Nine Inch Nails, Einsturzende Neubauten, thing like this, so the Victorian atmosphere in my book was all in the text. I couldn’t fool myself into thinking something was there which was not there.

-I know what you mean, it’s too much to put the clothes and the skin together !

-MF : Well, it's an interesting phrase ! I will tell it to my wife when I see her back in Scotland.

-Who have been your influential writers ?

-MF : In my late teens, I was very impressed by Kurt Vonnegut : he’s one of the few writers that I’ve read a lot of books by, because what I usually do is read one or two books by each writer, to learn and to see how they do what they do, and even if I have enjoyed it a lot, I move on to someone else, to see what could be in it. But, with Vonnegut, and also with Dickens, I read just about everything. But now, when I look back on Vonnegut’s books, I find him more difficult to read than I did then, because his women are not so good, they are in another country, and he writes about the men he understands, and I have a problem with that absent half of the human race ! As I said, I love the works of Dickens, who’s also not so good with women, but Dickens's prose is wonderful, and the way everything in his books is alive and all unanimated objects have life inside them. Sometimes grotesque and frightening lives, but it’s always alive. So I think I learned a lot from him. There’s another writer who comes to my mind though I have read him only after I’ve written my book, so it wasn’t an influence, but he’s someone who I think lives on the same planet as me, Bruno Schulz, I don’t know if people know him in France. He wrote wonderful short stories, and he was shot near the end of the second world war, I think it was a mistake, somebody thinking he was trying to escape. He wrote this wonderful book : ‘Street of crocodiles’. But I could say that I’ve been influenced by everything I’ve read, because I’ve read so much in the past.

-So, your novel is out here, translated at last !

-MF : Yes, I’m waiting now to see if it’s a flop or a big success. I hope it will work, and I mean I don’t need it to work for myself, because I feel that I’ve had more success than literary writers usually get in their lifetime. Many very fine writers go through an entire career with good reviews and a few sales here and there, and they grow old, they die and it’s over. I’ve actually had a lot of success with this book in several countries, and for me, it’s enough. But of course I would feel very bad for the publisher, as they made so many copies of this enormous piece of tree : this could sleep in a warehouse and I would be so embarrassed about that.

- ‘The crimson petal and the white’ is now published in French and, the first thing that comes to mind is its sheer size : how did you write it, over twenty five years ?

-MF : I began the book when I was about nineteen, around 79, and then I wrote between a hundred and hundred and fifty pages. Then, my first marriage became very eventful, very time consuming, and I really didn’t have enough energy or focus to write books unfortunately. So, I had to put it aside for quite a long time. I came back to it in my late twenties, and finished it very quickly, writing about eight pages a week. Then, I re-wrote it when I was in my thirties, I wrote it a third time, with a lot of advice from my second wife, and that’s the version that we have now. I didn’t know it would be such a big book, because, I’m gonna show you the size of my writing when I was younger (note: indeed, it’s very thin and concentrated), and it was not until my second wife bought me a computer and I typed it that I realized how huge this book is. And, when I realized it was such a big book, I decided to make this contract with the reader at the beginning, as the voice which is the prostitute’s voice takes you by the hand and says you gonna have a good time. And, all through the book, I’m very conscious of the need to keep the reader happy, so that he gets through this extremely long book. I’m not interested in the money, I don’t want someone to buy the book and then read twenty pages and get bored or tired or whatever and put it on the shelf : I want people to get to the end. I’m smiling inside, because I know that when people approach the book, they’re thinking : ‘ I don’t know if I can read something that big’, and then, when they get to the end, they say : ‘How ! Where is the rest ? It should have been longer’. It is one of the rewards for me when that happens to people.

-It’s funny because, at least in comparison, your novel, ‘The courage consort’, is rather very short...

-MF : It’ s very short, 120 pages, and it’s about music, about a group of a capella singers who sing ancient music, and also rock and avant-garde music ; they’re given an impossible new pieced form, and they rehearse in a forest in Belgium. While they rehearsing, there’s a lot of tension between them, sexual tension, artistic tension, and also the main character has forgotten, accidentally or on purpose, her anti depressors with her, and while she’s in this forest, she starts to come to life again, because she has been a nun for many years. It’s a very different kind of story, there's much more humor in it than in ‘Under the skin’ !

-The amount of research for such a book has surely been huge ?

-MF : I’ve been through a number of stages : when I planned the book, I was very young, I knew nothing about London. I knew a lot about Victorian literature because I’d read so much, but I’d never been to London or to England. All I had was a local map, the sort of map that they give to Japanese tourists (Michel shows me this very map while talking to me) to show them where Mme Tussaud is, and with this map I planned out where the characters would live and where they would go. Totally inaccurate of course, many of these streets have been demolished and rebuilt, but I needed to be on that simple scale to plan the story. And then, later, in subsequent years, I corrected all my mistakes and I got original maps from 1870’s and joined the community of academics and scholars of the eighteenth century, and well, you see, at the end, there’s a huge list of people that I thank, all these people helped me with particularly interesting details.

-This book takes place at the end of the nineteenth century in London : why did you choose this particular period ? Because of the industrial revolution and all the changes they brought to society and the industry ?

-MF : One of the weird things is that people regard the Victorians as the creators of the industrial revolution, but it really had happened a long time before. One of the weird sthing about the works of Jane Austen is that it’s so ruled and perfect and ancient, but that was when the industrial revolution was happening, and then it doesn’t exist for her in her little society. By the time of the Victorian period, people had worked out what they’d made, what did happen, and they realized that that had unleashed this enormous catastrophe which they were also very proud of, they were ambivalent about it, because they were captains of empires but they could also see that the old ways of life has been destroyed. One interesting thing, I think, about the Victorians is that, people like Emmeline fox and Henry is that they are very, sincerely and genuinely wanting to repair the damage that the industrial revolution had done. They are very altruistic in many ways. Victorian have that reputation for being hypocrites, but I don’t think they are more hypocrite than other centuries, and most of the great charitable institutions in the world were started during the Victorian period.

-It’s like a serial, as you can’t read many pages at one time, so you have to read a piece every day, and, at the end it’s like a friend disappearing...

-MF : Well, it’s a very modern novel of course, a twentieth century novel, but one of the interesting things about the nineteenth century reading experience is the way they got into these torments and they would get those pieces of Dickens or whoever it was, and when they had finished reading, they would have to wait, and during the time they were waiting they would be constructing the story themselves. We don’t have that kind of reading experience anymore, because we are free to read the whole thing in one go. And one of the reasons why the end is the way it is that it invites you to construct the continuation, your own end.

-The role of women is essential in your books, as it already was in ‘Under the skin’, with the main character of Isserley, and here with all those women hovering around William Rackam ...

-MF : I don’t really know why so many of my characters have been female. I grew up in Australia in the late 1970’s, which was a very feminist environment, and my first wife, before she met me, used to be a lesbian so I knew a lot of female homosexuals, and that anti-male perspective was something that was all around me. So that’s probably one of the reasons. Also, I’ve always felt very alienated, very divorced from what I was supposed to be as a male, which is another reason. But, as the years goes by, I’m much more comfortable being a man, and my next novel will have a male protagonist, who is a good man, I promise !

-But William and Henry both have good and bad sides...

-MF : Sure, and Henry is a lovely person.

-You wrote that female writers are more honest than male writers, at least Sugar writes it...

-MF : Sugar is not necessarily my voice, but there's a lot of me in her, she’s very much like my younger self, angry, alienated. But I think it’s the job of a good novelist to be in all the characters, and, when you take all the characters together and fuse them into a single entity, that should be the novel and the novelist. But yes, Sugar is very dear to me. One of the things that people often don’t realize is that even if the narrative is in the third person, usually it’s authorial, it’s so fused with the feelings and the limitations of the characters that they’re examining at that time, so, many of the things which the novel invites you to take as fact, are really just what Sugar understands and believes.

-Especially in that time when women were not such allowed to evolve alone, or learn, or read : being an educated women wasn’t well considered...

-MF : Have we fixed it ? I mean, have we resolved this question ? I don’t think we have. I still don’t think men or women are for, really, and then I don’t know what women are for, we’re still stumbling around, trying to find the answers, and I like this idea of taking the reader back to a period when these questions were very fresh.

-Sugar is the main character of the book, and she has a lot in common with Isserley, physically, intellectually and physically as well as socially...can we say that Isserley is a modern Sugar, a future incarnation of her ?

-MF : It could be, sure, I think it’s a fair comment, and the damage that had been done to Sugar through the fact that her mother forced her into prostitution is in a different way similar to the damage that was done to Isserley to make her fit in in the human world, if we can say so. It’s different with ‘under the skin’, because she doesn’t want to talk to people too much, but yes, there is that same kind of women.

-Religion is very present in this book : are you a believer yourself, or at least interested in the subject, or is it because it used to be a big part of society, Victorian or else ?

MF : No, I’m an Atheist, and when I was younger, I was furiously opposed to religion, very bitter, and, if someone had given me the opportunity, I would have destroyed all the churches in the world. I was so angry. And, as I grew older, even if I’m still an Atheist, I realized how much people need that reassurance that someone, in the universe is taking care of things, and it’s like the ultimate parent. All the characters in the book are looking for a parent. One of the things that the Victorians really understood, which is why they fought so hard against the discoveries of Charles Darwin and why they seem completely fanatical in their desire to hang on to these faeries is that they could see, they could anticipate the chaos that would follow if you killed God ,and they could see how millions of people would be completely lost and feeling totally purposeless.

-Religion has once again become a big subject of discussion and violence today...

-MF : Yes, exactly, because throughout, even in the late twentieth century, people thought that they didn’t need religion, they had Steven Spielberg or something. But now, it has reached a crisis. I think the reasons why this huge clash between, let’s say capitalism and the Muslim world if you like, it’s a battleground between a whole vacuum, as they perceive it, a vacuum in which we can only consume, and buy things, not a spiritual core, and what they perceive to be morality, religion, whatever, which I’m very ambivalent about because I despise any oppressive religion, so I’m obviously not going to wave a flag for Islam, because Islam has been causing grief recently. But, at the same time, if I contemplate the extremes of western capitalism, with people clicking, zombie-like in front of a computer game, then that’s very frightening too...

-‘Alice in Wonderland’ is also very present and representative of the diverse thoughts of the female characters, Sophie, but also Agnes, Emmeline or Sugar : all of them are looking through the looking glass...

-MF : Yes, absolutely, and ‘Alice In Wonderland’ is also about neurosis and so forth it’s a book about identity, who am I, who can I be, and if I change, am I still the same person or am I something different, there are all these issues of course, very relevant.

-The end : Sugar and Sophie, once escaped from the Rackham house, are they traveling away or are they dying, far from William and everybody ?

-MF : There are possibilities for all of us ! Well, I think that the book is very much a test, of what you’re like, if you’re a pessimist or optimist, glass half full/ glass half empty person. Some people who read the book say that it’s very obvious, on the page after the end of the book, the police will catch them, Sophie will be given back to Rackham, Sugar miserable and will be put in jail. And other people are convinced that they escape, and there are hints in the last hundred pages of the book, when Sugar is teaching Sophie, they do a lot of things, a lot of lessons about Australia, and there’s also a part where she’s reading the newspaper and she sees an advertisement about steam ships which go to New York. Again, if the reader wants to carry on that narrative, there’s your own invitation !

-But they can die, like Agnes, or kill themselves, and we don’t know if Sugar brings her money with her when they run away...

-MF : No, she’s got the money, I believe. I don’t know, but I’m confident that they will succeed in something. Put it this way : throughout that finale phase of the book, when Sugar is teaching Sophie, when she’s been, in fact, a mother, Sugar is frequently tempted to mistreat Sophie, because of the voice of her own mother, which goes of course for every person who has been damaged or sexually abused, there’s always a big risk that it will be this eternal cycle, and Sugar, even if she’s sorely tempted, always resists. So, I believe that, if she’s been be able to resist for so long, she will continue to be able to resist. I don’t believe that, for example, she will make Sophie a prostitute, it’s finished for her, that cycle is broken, and I believe she will genuinely notch that girl to the maximum extend possible. As for Agnes, I don’t believe that the body on the mortuary slab is Agnes : I think that William was so desperate for closure, for the story of Agnes to be finished, so he could start again with Lady Bridgelow, and he needed to see Agnes dead, and so, seeing this body with the correct color of pubic hair, for him was enough, and then it became reality, once he has made that mental leap. I believe that Agnes would have followed Sugar’s instructions, have stayed on the train till the end. But what happens at the end I don’t know.

-The knowledge is an important quest for almost all characters : of work, history, their body, etc : they have a kind of lust for learning all they can...

-MF : Yes, they all want to evolve into something better which, of course, is my yearning, too ! Many of the characters are lost, they are looking for parents, for someone to take care of them, for someone to show them the way to be better.

-The novel is now adapted for the cinema by Curtis Hanson : can you tell us more ?

-MF : People are presuming that because the producer is Laura Siskind, who produced Spiderman, then Sugar would be Kirsten Dunst. I don’t know if it’s just industry rumor or whether there’s a substantial basis. She’s little, like Sugar, but I’ve never seen her except back on a seat in a plane on our way to Canada, because Spiderman was playing. I didn’t have headphones, so I didn’t hear the dialogues, but I don’t know if I missed a lot, because it’s a film for pre teenagers, it’s a cartoon, really. She seems to be charming, and I was told that she was very good in other films.

-She’s acting at the moment near Paris, at the Versailles Castle, playing Marie Antoinette. And about William ?

-MF : No, no idea...

-Did you have any proposal for ‘Under the skin’ ?

-MF : Well, yes, in fact, it’s gonna be a movie soon.

-By whom ? David Cronenberg ?

-MF : David Cronenberg would be good, wouldn’t he ? He did an amazing job with ‘The naked lunch’, I didn’t think anyone could do anything with that book. But the person who’s doing it is Jonathan Glazer, who directed ‘Sexy beast’. He’s a strong director. I don’t know what he will do with ‘Under the skin’ : it’s a big risk, because it could be ridiculous, very easily.

-It’s always difficult to adapt a book for the cinema, but it would be easy to turn ‘Crimson petal...’ into a ‘nice’ movie about the 19th century, with lovely pictures and nothing in it...

-MF : Yes ! When I wrote the book, I needed the costumes and the atmospheres and the architecture, but it’s so secondary, way down the list of important themes : the main importance is that very strong emotional and philosophical heart, and in fact, often in films it’s Victorian Eurodisney or something. So, we’ll have to hope ! But the book is very cinematic, it’s a movie for the head. So I feel I’ve already given it to the people, and then, be your own director ! As soon as the movie is ready, I’ll go to the cinema, along with everyone else, that will be the first knowledge, first experience I have of it !

-Do you have some regards on the scenario or else ?

-MF : No. If it had any chance to be a good film, it should be made entirely by film makers. I think that if the author gets involved, it will be a literary perspective and not a cinematic one. And also, so many authors are naive, they listen to the siren calls of Hollywood, someone telling them that it would be great, they love your work and they can write the screenplay : they spend two years in writing the screenplay and teach themselves how to write a screenplay during that period, and then, at the end of this huge process, some guy in a suit says that actually, we need some black people in this, and the ending is too dark. Then, they would bring in some professional script doctor, and other, and the author crawls away, heart broken, and each author never learns from the experience of the others ! So I figured that it would be wise and get back, and let the disaster unfold in which case I can say that’s it’s not my fault and it has nothing to do with me...or it could be a wonderful surprise, what of course I’d prefer. We’ll find out together !

-If your life was a movie ?

-MF : The movie character I identified with most is Thomas Jerôme Newton in ‘The man who fell to Earth’, by Nicolas Roeg (note: played by David Bowie) : if there’s anyone in a movie that could be me, it is him !

-You started with a short stories collection, ‘The rain must fall’ : did you write other short stories and will it be published in the future ?

-MF : I do, and my next book will be a short stories collection : In Britain, it will be published in September I guess, and will be called ‘The Fahrenheit twins and other stories’. I still very much value the short story form, and I wish that more people read short stories. It’s a mystery to me why. It’s possible that l’Olivier will publish my short stories, sometimes in the future, in which case, even if only a few hundred people read them, well a few hundred people is valuable to me as readers, so I hope that will happen !

-What are your musical tastes ?

-MF : I have very wide musical tastes, anything that has no chance of getting played on commercial radios is potentially interesting me. I play a lot of jazz, more avant-garde side of jazz, like Alice Coltrane, Pheroah Saunders, Miles Davis after ‘Bitche’s brew’, the electric period, and jazz funk a lot. I love certain kinds of industrial music, like Nurse With Wounds, Coil, Psychic TV : I really love Psychic TV, and the way that their records are all different, there are many different phases in their career. I love progressive rock of all kind, Genesis, King Crimson, and the splendidly unfashionable Emerson Lake and Palmer that I still enjoy a lot. I really like krautrock, Tangerine Dream, Ash Ra Temple, Klaus Schulze : this afternoon, in Jussieu, I bought a CD of Klaus Schulze’s ‘Picture music’ which is one of my favorite Klaus Schulze albums, with thirty minutes of extra music. I can’t wait to get home and hear those thirty minutes of extra music : I only hope it’s coming from 1972, too !

-And we were talking about Nine Inch Nails...

-MF : Yes, I love them, as well as Einsturzende Neubauten, and Ministry : their last album is fantastic ! They have an interesting career in the sense that, if you’ve ever heard their first album, it’s very dancefloor, and to think that they moved from that ! I’ve heard KMFDM too, but not that much. This fury against Georges Bush has produced this Ministry album, with all the songs starting with ‘W’. There’s also a insane anti-Bush assault on the new Cure album as well, their strongest album for a long time, so there’s maybe one tiny benefit from that catastrophe of Georges Bush’s reelection on music !

-Do you have a new book on the way ?

-MF : I have started writing a new novel, but I don’t have a title yet. At this stage, I’m still looking for the correct spirit of the book. I have many ideas, many sketches for dialogues, outlines and plot, but the book can’t live until I know what aura, what spiritual aura is going to come off it, and I’m not there yet. I’m reading a lot of books written by Christian missionaries, in very outlandish places, like those who wanted to convert headhunters in Africa or South America. Many of them are very badly written, because those people are not stylists, but there’s something about the desire to change unchangeable minds, I’m very interested in it at the moment, and I think that’s gonna be the philosophical heart of the next book.

Interview made in Paris on May 10th, 2005.

Thanks to Marion Laforge for her help.