January 23 2009, 5:49 AM
I'm sad to report that Michel Faber, god among men, has written kind of a dumb book. I bow to no one in my love of this writer. "Under the Skin" was amazing, and his short story collection "Vanilla Bright like Eminem" -- I'm getting chills. Seriously, this writer has made me cry, twice, on the train, with the title story from that collection and the title story from the collection "The Courage Consort." Just a beautiful, controlled, thoughtful, writerly writer who's not afraid to go for a big emotional moment.
So I felt like either he wrote "The Fire Gospel" in a single weekend, or his agent or editor wrote it for him. The book does contain a superhero-like literary editor who is gorgeous and sexy and seems to make a ton of money. But it's a sloppy piece of work and I was disappointed in it. One of the things I adore about Faber's work is the way he writes about worlds I don't know with perfect detail. But when he wrote about a world I do know, he got it wrong. Here's one small detail -- he thinks it is faster to fly from Baltimore to Philly than to take the train. This turns into a major plot point in the middle of the book, and the whole time I'm going, "No! no!" He or his editor could have taken 60 seconds to glance at a train schedule (available at amtrak.com). At the end of the day, I think the failure of this book is more an indictment of modern publishing than of Faber, because this is so markedly a first draft and was so clearly not edited at all by anybody. In fact, this book is so below-par for him, I'm just going to disregard it. The rest of his oeuvre stands on its own and is wonderful.
On the other hand, I'm reading "Grimus" by Salman Rushdie now, and remembering how much I like his writing when he writes science fiction. It's his first published book, and he's clearly enjoying himself crafting sentences and moving his characters through space and time.
So I felt like either he wrote "The Fire Gospel" in a single weekend, or his agent or editor wrote it for him. The book does contain a superhero-like literary editor who is gorgeous and sexy and seems to make a ton of money. But it's a sloppy piece of work and I was disappointed in it. One of the things I adore about Faber's work is the way he writes about worlds I don't know with perfect detail. But when he wrote about a world I do know, he got it wrong. Here's one small detail -- he thinks it is faster to fly from Baltimore to Philly than to take the train. This turns into a major plot point in the middle of the book, and the whole time I'm going, "No! no!" He or his editor could have taken 60 seconds to glance at a train schedule (available at amtrak.com). At the end of the day, I think the failure of this book is more an indictment of modern publishing than of Faber, because this is so markedly a first draft and was so clearly not edited at all by anybody. In fact, this book is so below-par for him, I'm just going to disregard it. The rest of his oeuvre stands on its own and is wonderful.
On the other hand, I'm reading "Grimus" by Salman Rushdie now, and remembering how much I like his writing when he writes science fiction. It's his first published book, and he's clearly enjoying himself crafting sentences and moving his characters through space and time.
