8 minute read
Conversations between creatives
Photographer Simon Richmond
Folkestone-based writers Michel Faber and Ann Morgan talk about the joys of incomprehension, favourite books and music, and a certain Intrepid Blonde
Advertisement
The award-winning author of Under the Skin, The Crimson Petal and the White and D (A Tale of Two Worlds), Faber is a writer who reinvents himself with each book. Morgan is best known for Reading the World: How I Read a Book From Every Country, has penned two novels and hosts the podcast The World in Folkestone produced by CT20.
After 25 years living in rural isolation in the Scottish Highlands, Faber moved to Folkestone in 2016, the same year Morgan arrived in town – both were looking for an affordable home where they could have their own writing room. The Foghorn caught up with them at Steep Street, where they were already in deep conversation about Victoriana, Anne Frank and post-Communist Poland. Also at the table is Faber’s enigmatic companion, the Intrepid Blonde.
Ann: Did you find that your writing changed when you moved here?
Michel: No, I can write in a concrete bunker or with a brick wall facing me outside. I wrote a Victorian novel in tiny little shoebox flats in Australia. But, my children’s book D (A Tale of Two Worlds) is set in Folkestone, except I call it Cawberon-Sands. That uses my environment, so that’s a new thing.
Ann: Being in Folkestone has influenced my writing. I wrote my second novel Crossing Over shortly after we moved here, and it explores an encounter, which at the time was almost speculative, because it wasn’t really happening a lot back then, between someone who’d arrived on a small boat across the Channel and an old woman living on the coast. That’s much more of a reality now.
I write both fiction and non-fiction – there’s a spine to my work, but it presents in different ways. A lot of that is about how we can never fully understand one another, but by interacting, we can perhaps arrive at a better understanding of ourselves. This incomprehension idea is something I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about lately because my first book was based on this project I did to read a book from every country in the world in a year. It’s 10 years since that original quest and I’ve continued to do all sorts of things connected to it. I’m literary explorer in residence at the Cheltenham Literature Festival, which essentially means that I get to think of mad ideas and suggest them to the festival.
Michel: It’s a lovely job description.
Ann: The great thing about that is I can make it up and sort of decide what it means. I developed this incomprehension workshop designed to help readers explore literature outside their comfort zone, from unfamiliar traditions. Whoever you are and whatever you’re an expert in, you can’t be an expert in all world literature – it’s too vast. So there are going to be things that you don’t understand, references you don’t get, ways that stories work that you don’t connect with or can’t understand fully. Learning to be comfortable with not knowing, and to see what it reveals, not only about the story, but also about your own biases, is a really interesting process.
Michel: That gulf of incomprehension … it’s completely universal. And if people really, really knew how badly they’re misunderstanding or how big the gulf is between them and the next person, I think it would blow their brains apart. A lot of my work is about that alienation. I write about all these aliens, people who don’t belong in the environment. In my novel Under the Skin there’s this woman
from another planet who’s trying to get the hang of humans. In The Book of Strange New Things, there’s a Christian minister from here going to another planet to minister to the spiritual needs of the indigenous population. And I’m Dutch, so I’m not Anglo, so there’s that gulf. And I’m probably ‘on the spectrum’ – the more I think about these issues, the more I think that’s highly likely. That sense of the other and how we classify the other, and how we deal with the otherness of others, it goes through all my work.
Ann: Something that fascinates me about you is that you’re a writer who defies classification or categorization. You don’t fit neatly in any one box, which I’m really jealous of because, for a writer at my stage of career, there is a real demand to fit in a box.
Michel: I was really fortunate to get together with Canongate, my main publisher, because they were an indie and they defied the boxes themselves. The way fate worked out, they became quite a substantial publisher rather than going down the plughole, which is the fate of most brave new indie publishers. Also, I think it’s partly gendered, in the sense that our culture has a greater tendency to put females into boxes than males.
Ann: With my first novel Beside Myself, which was about identical twins who swap places in a childhood game and then get trapped in the wrong lives when one refuses to swap back, I was constantly asked, are you a twin, because you couldn’t possibly have made that up. You must be just writing about yourself and your life. Actually, no, I’m not a twin. I did make it up. And there was always this sense of disappointment.
Michel: Yes. Whereas I suspect at a literary festival, the male author who had written that book would very soon be talking about the uncanny and doppelgangers.
Ann: You’re currently working on a book about music. What led you to that?
Michel: Again, it’s that alienation thing in that we assume that everyone is hearing what we’re hearing. But, in fact, we’re hearing differently, we’re processing differently. This whole notion that there’s good and bad music and that there’s authorities who tell us what’s good and bad. And the anxiety about being in the right gang. The nervousness about liking the wrong music. It’s all tribalism.
Ann: This question of tribalism and nationality, when it comes to writing, is a huge problem. I spend a lot of time thinking about what makes a book from somewhere? In the last 10 years, there’s been a lot more interest in translation in the UK. More things are coming through, which is great to see, but the problem is that because nationality is now being used as a marketing tool by lots of publishers, there is again the box- filling thing. Much as you are examining with music, it’s that idea of who controls this notion of what’s in the club, what’s out of the club.
Michel: One of the chapters in Listen, my music book, looks at culturally significant musical figures in various countries, and that in the Anglo world, they mean nothing. In Poland, you’ve got Czesław Niemen. In France, you’ve got Alain Bashung. In Italy, you’ve got Franco Battiato, who’s just amazing and did everything, and nobody here has any notion who he was.
Ann: Why don’t we know who these people are?
Michel: I think there’s an allergy in the Anglo world to having to make the effort to engage with another language. People in Europe are used to the fact that the country next door speaks a different language, and that if you like music, you might have to open your horizons to not understanding what the person’s singing about.
Ann: An argument I often encounter is that we’ve got enough in our own culture. We don’t have time to listen to or read everything that we produce. So why should we look further? It’s that resistance to looking further which is frustrating. Because when you do start to, you discover all these wonderful things. What should I listen to?
Michel: I would recommend Povera Patria by Franco Battiato, which is him singing in his heartbreakingly tender voice about the disgusting corruption of the Italian political system.
Ann: Lovely. In return I’d like to recommend the memoir An African in Greenland by Tété-Michel Kpomassie, a Toganese explorer who decided to run away to Greenland at the age of 14. He worked his way up through Africa in the 1950s and 60s, learning languages as he went, relying on the kindness of strangers, picking up on jobs on the way. Got a boat to Europe, got up through Europe to Denmark. Got a boat to Greenland, lived with the Inuit for two years and then wrote this extraordinary book about his journey and this wow experience. I love this book … it’s so joyful, so full of curiosity, so much about discovering the world and being open to possibility and exchange. [Referring to the Intrepid Blonde] We’ve been leaving someone out of the conversation for a while. Perhaps you could tell us a bit about her?
Michel: I found her in 1994 in Glasgow at the Barras, a very proletarian, very old-school market. At the end each day, stallholders leave stuff behind and she was one of the things left behind. She didn’t have any clothes, just her undies. Since then she’s got herself various dresses and things, still a limited wardrobe.
Ann: She’s been very quiet.
Michel: She is very quiet. She is a mystery to me. She loves to look at things, but she doesn’t share her findings with me. However, I can tell if she’s uneasy and if she’s fascinated, and that’s probably enough. I think with human beings, language is quite a late add-on in evolutionary terms. We got by without it for an awfully long time. And I think it’s overrated. I know we’re both writers, but even so I think language is overrated and there’s a lot of nonverbal stuff going on and she’s very sensitive to all that.
