Unto The End: Michel Faber on his last masterpiece

Within minutes of meeting Michel Faber – at the tram stop outside Media City in Manchester, where he has spent the morning recording his part on the Radio 4 show, The Verb – he tells me that his wife, Eva, died only two months previously. It stops me in my tracks. "What are you doing?" I say. "Doing this?" – meaning the interview. "Eva would have wanted it," he answers. "She helped me to connect with people and I want to honour the influence she had on me." 

We take a seat in the Lowry, the vast, bizarre temple to all things art and entertainment, and I ask him about his tremendous new novel, The Book of Strange New Things, an intricate, involved piece of science fiction that follows a minister called Peter as he travels to a new world on the other side of the galaxy. At the behest of a shadowy organisation he provides teaching to a race of alien creatures known as the Oasans, leaving his wife Beatrice behind on Earth.

"I wanted to do something different," Michel tells me. "I wanted to challenge myself." With The Crimson Petal and the White, the large, bestselling historical novel he wrote over a twenty year period (published in 2002), "I had it planned out so that I knew what I would write each day. With The Book of Strange New Things I didn’t do that – I wanted to go on the same adventure as Peter, and discover things as he discovered things."

I tell Michel that when I first received the proof of the book, it was entirely white without any clue as to what the story was about. At that time there was nothing on Amazon by way of a synopsis. So I read blind, read the book in much the same way as he wrote it, knowing only that this was a book by Michel Faber. He seems extremely pleased by this. "I would love readers to come to the book without knowing anything about it, to just start reading because they knew it was a book by me and they trusted me to take them on a journey."

We talk about the way in which the book is as much about a marriage and the strain of separation as it is about life on an alien world. I ask if it helped him at all, to work through his feelings about Eva’s illness as he wrote. "Writing a novel requires intense concentration and the freedom to vanish into an imaginative space. I found that almost impossible because I was caring for Eva. By 2013 I was reconciling myself to the fact that this book would never be finished. Then Eva pleaded with me to write just six lines a day. Six lines, you can do that, she said. For a long time that's all I managed, but then it gained momentum. Eva got to see me finish the book, helped me edit it, knew that it would come out."

"I would love readers to come to the book without knowing anything about it, to just start reading" – Michel Faber

I say to Michel that it’s possible, given the success afforded by Jonathan Glazer’s recent adaptation of his 2000 novel, Under the Skin, that there will be readers who come to The Book of Strange New Things and think he is only a science fiction writer. "For a long time," he answers, "with the success of The Crimson Petal and the White, lots of readers thought I was a historical novelist. Publishers would send piles of terrible historical novels looking for cover quotes from me." The implicit suggestion is that being thought of as a science fiction writer wouldn’t be such a bad thing. We talk some more about Under the Skin, a film that was developed over a long period, and was at one point a double header between Scarlett Johansson and Brad Pitt, both of whom were deeply committed to the project. After various ups and downs and financial setbacks, the script was finally reframed to focus only on Scarlett Johansson’s character – and was all the better for it, according to Michel. "Obviously it’s very different from my book but when I saw it – I got Eva out of hospital for one night to attend the screening at the BFI, and we looked at each other at one point in the film, as it sank in what an amazing thing we were watching." I tell Michel that when I saw it people walked out of the cinema. "At what point?" he asks, seemingly pleased and enthusiastic for my answer. "All the way through," I reply, and he laughs gently.

I ask Michel where he feels he is in terms of his career and he looks at the copy of The Book of Strange New Things on the table between us. "This will be my last novel," he says. Again, I’m shocked. "What? No!" He explains that he had a certain number of novels in him, and those are now done. In any case, losing Eva – the person he most wanted to share his work with – has made him feel that an era is over. Which isn’t to say that he doesn’t have plans. "I'll no doubt write the odd short story now and then. Also, Eva was a tremendous artist in her own right," he enthuses, showing me photographs and artworks she produced during her illness. "She wrote a lot of fiction too, some of which is pretty much final draft and some of which is more sketchy. I'd like to collaborate with her on those stories. I’m also writing poetry." I interject to say that Hardy stopped writing novels and concentrated on poetry, after the terrible critical reception afforded Jude the Obscure. Michel admits that he doesn’t know how The Book of Strange New Things will be taken. "It’s been a long time since my last book," he says. "I’ve had a number of very kind early readers and reviewers but I don’t know if it will be a success or not." I try to reassure him, I think the book is tremendously good, easily as good as anything he has written before, and he asks me if I think the book is "even" – I say that I think it is. Of course it is.

He reads me a selection of the poetry, which is profoundly moving, focusing as it does, on Eva’s illness and Eva’s death and the misplaced kindnesses people offer in the circumstances. He tells me about a 12" he worked on with Andrew Liles, of Nurse with Wound, showing me a story of a Pope walking amongst a field of newborn babies that has been read aloud by a small child. He also digs out a copy of Ohrwurm, a collaboration he worked on with Andrew and Eva. He shows me many photographs he has taken recently in San Francisco, of a pair of Eva’s red shoes in a variety of backdrops. He is, then, keeping himself busy at an incredibly difficult time. For his readers, there is a substantial new book that repays repeated readings, just as The Crimson Petal and the White did, just as Under the Skin did, just as Some Rain Must Fall and The Courage Consort and, indeed, all of his books – nine other books as different from one another as can be, as distinctive and rewarding as a reader could want. "I think that’s enough," Michel underlines.