Michel Faber: The Courage Consort

[novella]

This is a collection of three novellas. I’ve finished two of them and just want to put my thoughts up (like canning a peach?) while the stories are fresh.

The title novella, The Courage Consort, is the longest and also the most gracefully executed. After a rather depressing opening, Faber manages to create a dramatic situation with enough tension to keep the pages turning, i.e. a professional a cappella singing group of five members takes a Belgian chateau for a week in order to practice a difficult piece. Faber is great here on characters’ internal wrestling, nature/nurture impulses, and playing with social constructs.

When I was well into the second novella, The One Hundred and Ninety-Nine Steps, I thought Faber had lost his touch: the dialogue in Steps is noticeably awkward. On reflection, I realized that Faber had used dialogue only sparingly in Consort and was much more successful in conveying relationships, character, and, ultimately, the resolution, which comes in the form of change in the characters’ perspectives, without dialogue, but with characters’ inner thoughts and actions.

In both, Faber’s protagonists are middle-aged women going through personal difficulties and facing inner demons. The reader’s experience is strictly from these women’s points of view, and (if you can trust these viewpoints) his male characters tend to be oblivious, driven, selfish types, with a notable exception (but I will not spoil).

Unfortunately both of his heroines suffer from imagined nightly terrors, which makes both stories somewhat samey, to no effective purpose. There’s also an unexplained psychic element in the second story, something I wish he would have at least acknowledged as a phenomenon, but it only serves as window-dressing. But I’m being picky (as always). In fact, both stories have a creepy Gothic element that works, and complex, multidimensional protagonists with their own secrets, and the stories are worth reading.

His main characters’ crises are well-drawn, which makes for strong, unpredictable plotting, but as for the rest of the cast, I can’t help feel that he’s intentionally collected, in both cases, an array of characters meant to reflect a certain stereotypical breadth of humanity, rather than a plausible group of individuals. His development of these secondary characters seems cursory much of the time.

I feel like I’m trashing these stories, though that’s not my intention. Maybe because the mood is so low at the start of each, that I feel that with all their merits, the resolutions didn’t bring any kind of transcendence or joy; they merely witnessed their heroines climbing out of their respective holes to something like ground level, so there is no “Ahhh!” moment, just a closing of the covers.

Wow, I’m so critical. If someone on a bus asked me what I thought of this book, I’d say, “It’s really good. Better than most.” So you can choose between the long version or the bus version.


I'll try to be brief on the third story, when I get to it.

 

[novella]

Might as well stick a review of the third novella on here.

The Farenheit Twins

This story was wildly different from the first two. For one thing, the protagonists are twin children, and we only see the world from their point of view. The story is a Utopian fantasy of sorts: the twins are born and raised in the Arctic tundra, in complete social isolation and with little parental guidance. Everything stems from that. They essentially develop their own culture and rites and beliefs based on nature, rumor, and the little they know of the rest of the world.

It's a strange story that works up the idea that twins can build a world unto themselves--which I think is true, to an extent. I don't think this story has the psychological depth of the other novellas in the book, and it didn't appeal to me particularly. It struck me as an "experiment."

Having finished the three novellas, what ties them together is the idea of death in a closed world and also how it is possible for a person to break free of their own expectations for themselves.

I can't say I'm crazy about this writer. A little too gothic and into the "closed world" scenario for my taste, but he's very good at taking his heroes through a significant, believable change. That said, the last story was IMO the weakest of the three.

 

[mamabookworm61]

novella,
Thanks for your assessment of the Faber book. I haven't read it, but it made me think of one I did just read. Beth Gutcheon's More than You Know also contains a "gothic element." It's the story of the lives of two women in two different time periods in the same Maine village. Excellent character development, dialogue, plotting; very readable. I love Gutcheon's exploration of troubled family relationships and of the layering of local regional histories. I mention it because I thought, based on your reaction to the Faber book, that you might enjoy Gutcheon's, and because I'd love to chat with someone about how the "ghost" element works in the Gutcheon novel! (I started a post on Gutcheon in the "authors" forum.)

 

[Shade]

The Courage Consort and The Hundred and Ninety-Nine Steps were published separately in the UK (I liked them both but I agree with your assessment of his shortcomings), and I hadn't heard of The Fahrenheit Twins until you mentioned it, novella. Possibly it was published in the UK in his first collection of stories, Some Rain Must Fall.

I'd be interested to know what he's been doing since (The Courage Consort, his most recently written book, came out in 2001 in the UK, I think). The Crimson Petal and the White was written by him years and years ago, but only published when he had made a name for himself, so by my reckoning he must be working on something big...

I liked Under the Skin too, though it was a bit obvious from the start what the whole premise was.

 

[Stewart]

'The Courage Consort' - Michel Faber

Michel Faber’s The Courage Consort is one of those books where you wish it were longer or part of a collection. A novella of 150 pages it follows the story of a group of singers sent to Belgium for two weeks in order to rehearse a new avant-garde piece for an upcoming event. As they spend more time in each other’s company the group falls apart due to personality conflicts and personal problems.

Roger Courage is the founder of the singing group, named The Courage Consort, although the courage in their name comes from their willingness to tackle contemporary pieces in addition to the traditional standards. His wife, Catherine, is a manic depressive who, in preparation for the trip to Belgium, has forgotten her pills. Ben is an overweight bass singer who lives in his own personal world of silence. Julian is a seemingly bisexual vocalist with a love for Bohemian Rhapsody. And Dagmar, a young German, is the opposite of Catherine in her love for life; she has also, for the trip, brought along her newborn child, Axel.

The book begins with Catherine Courage sitting on the window ledge contemplating whether the four storey drop would be enough to kill her as her husband sit in the next room. As it continues the quintet spend the days practising Partitum Mutante, the avant-garde piece of Italian composer Pino Fugazzi, while the nights provide them with an over exposure to each other that leads to constant arguments about the direction the group should take. Their inability to work with each other leads to an incident that eventually breaks up the group, who are “possibly the seventh most renowned in the world”, although there is some hope for the group as evidenced by the optimistic ending.

The prose is light, the vocabulary restrained, and the plot simple. There is humour in this book but it’s not laugh out loud funny; the Brits’ interpretations of European accents, and the way characters communicate with each other. The characters are nicely done although the woman were better drawn than the males, a common occurrence in Faber’s work. Catherine, as the main character, is well conceived – her thoughts were realistic, her dialogue seemed right, and her mania added that extra bit of depth.

Faber’s novella is a good read, although, like in The Crimson Petal and the White, he leaves a few things unanswered – the source of a recurring noise from the nearby forest being a prime example – but this does provide scope for interpretation. Maybe we can presume that some parts of the story are delusions of Catherine’s. The Courage Consort almost succeeds as a standalone book, but I couldn’t help but feel that the characters needed a little more to fully appreciate them. That said, the story is still worth appreciating.

 

[Stewart]

I'd be interested to know what he's been doing since (The Courage Consort, his most recently written book, came out in 2001 in the UK, I think).

I read an interview recently wherein he said that he had two novels (named A Photograph of Jesus and Ship of Fools) which were yet to see the light of day. The former, he stated, probably wouldn't be released as it has missed the boat due to its content; the latter may be touched up and released. Other than that, I have no idea.