Michel Faber lays bare his grief at the death of his wife

Best-selling author Michel Faber lays bare his grief at the death of his wife from cancer in a collection of searing poems, writes David Robinson

Michel Faber has created fictional universes out of the oddest of places – a Victorian brothel, a colonising mission at the far end of the galaxy – and made them disturbingly real. Such a capacious imagination has produced books that are wildly different to each other. Except in general terms, he has kept his own life out of the picture in all of them.

Until now. Undying, his first collection of poetry, written after the death of his wife Eva, could hardly be more personal. Screeds of poetry have been written on the theme of bereavement and trying to remember and honour a loved one, but few, if any, trace the panorama of grief with such visceral intimacy.

Eva was more than just Faber’s wife of 26 years. She was the person who persuaded him that writing should be more than a selfindulgent hobby, that he should push for publication and make a career of it.

As he wrote the books which made him famous, she was his first and best reader, sometimes (as with The Crimson Petal and the White) suggesting changes so radical that he had to rethink the whole ending of the novel, occasionally (as in The Courage Consort) inventing key characters. Always, she was his shield against the world, protecting him from media intrusion. She was his manager, editor, lover, wife, friend.

They lived in a converted railway station north of the Cromarty Firth, four miles from Tain. Isolation suited them. They were one of those couples who had enough in each other and didn’t seem to need anyone else. Though she was an artist and writer in her own right, she worked as a teacher so he could have the time to write.

The writing was a further bond between them; although the books were his creation, they only existed because of her. Either way, they reinforced their emotional self-sufficiency as a couple. “We are,” he once said, “like a little nation of two.”

When Eva found out that she had bone marrow cancer, friends feared how Michel would cope. At first, the news plunged him into depression that left him unable to write.

However, he says: “But in the later years of Eva’s cancer journey, when she became desperately ill, I ceased suffering from depression. A pragmatic calm settled over our relationship. I took care of her and finished The Book of Strange New Things, which had seemed inconceivable before. And after she died, I wasn’t depressed either, though I was distraught and anguished and bereft and disconsolate and somewhat mad .”

With a growing sense of purpose, he started writing poems about the slow spread of the multiple myeloma that had eaten away at his wife, moments of hope when chemotherapy blasted it into remission, then the remorseless, savage indignities it inflicted on her body as it finally, fatally, returned.

The second half of the book charts his first, uncertain steps into the world without Eva: regrets for things they used to share but now can’t, the attempted kindnesses of strangers, the sudden aches of solitariness, abruptly triggered tender memories.

Apart from three poems–one written in the first of the six years in which she had cancer,

My work has been about helping people confront big issues. I get letters thanking me for articulating things they’d felt were forbidden or inexpressible