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  Michel
Faber
The Courage Consort
Harcourt Trade Publishers
Reviewed by Jonathan Mills
The Courage Consort, Michel Faber’s recent collection of three short
novels, is painstakingly crafted and meticulously detailed. Happily, it is
also a terrific read, deliciously gloomy and absorbing, full of suspenseful
twists and pleasurable surprises.
We view the events of the title novella through the somewhat murky eyes of
Catherine, a spacey, suicidal soprano comprising one-fifth of the Courage
Consort, a choral quintet named for its leader, her husband Roger Courage.
The group has won the privilege of spending two subsidized weeks rehearsing a
new piece at a remote house in a Belgian forest, a prospect that pleases
Roger, a stiffly clueless man who phones the other members of the consort to
confirm the travel plans while his wife matter-of-factly contemplates jumping
out the window. Faber captures beautifully the protagonist’s thoughts here,
providing a vivid glimpse of someone both out of touch and strangely
cognizant of the world around her:
“Catherine was looking down at the ground far below. Half a dozen brightly
dressed children were loitering around in the car park, and she wondered why
they weren’t at school. Then she wondered what effect it would have on them
to see a woman falling, apparently from the sky, and bursting like a big
fruit right before their eyes.
“At the thought of that, she felt a trickle of mysterious natural chemical
entering her system, an injection of something more effective than her
antidepressants.”
In those two short paragraphs, Faber foreshadows the rest of the tale.
Without giving away anything vital, it should be noted that the consort’s
sojourn in the woods finds Catherine examining her place in the world, her
relationship to her husband and colleagues, and the nature of sanity itself.
After coming face to face with death, she proves more of a survivor than we
would have imagined. It is an oddly upbeat ending for a novella whose main
character is deeply depressed, yet Faber makes it wholly believable. Despite
suggestions of shopworn cliche, including eerie noises in the night, this
tale always veers from the predictable before becoming trite.
The second novella, The Hundred and Ninety-Nine Steps, also centers
around an intelligent, troubled woman. This time it’s Sian, an archaeology
student working at a dig in Yorkshire. Recently returned from war-ravaged
Bosnia, where she suffered both injury and bereavement, she finds herself
half-willingly drawn into an intrigue involving an old manuscript and a new
would-be lover.
Faber’s tone is lighter this time around. Despite her debilitating physical
maladies (the extent of which she’s afraid to confront), Sian clearly wants
to survive from the get-go. She is a likable character with a sharp sense of
humor and rational fears. Fortunately for the story, that doesn’t stop her
from getting drunk and stumbling around a graveyard in the middle of the
night. Ultimately, her wisdom shines through when she is faced with choosing
between the past and the future.
The concluding novella, The Fahrenheit Twins, finds Faber with tongue
planted firmly in cheek. On the frozen tundra of far northern Russia, twin
siblings, a girl named Tainto’lilith and a boy called Marko’cain, embark on a
journey. The twins, it seems, are the children of two anthropologists, a
husband-wife team, who have lived in this forbidding clime for years studying
the local indigenous population. The parents are effectively absent even when
they’re home, so the kids have pretty much raised themselves. They can read
and write and know how to handle a sled and a team of huskies, but of the
larger world they are entirely ignorant. When their mother, a distant if
benevolent figure, dies, their father, an even more distant figure of
uncertain motives, leaves it up to them to dispose of her body. They consider
burial, cremation, natural cryogenics, and less conventional methods:
“’I still don’t like to think of her frozen,” said Tainto’lilith, “even if
she can’t feel it. She is our mother, not a piece of lamb in the freezer.’
“Marko’cain nodded, accepting this, but then an instant later he frowned, stung
in the forehead by a new idea.
“’Perhaps we should eat her,’ he said.”
After the wholly satisfying realism of The Courage Consort and The
Hundred and Ninety-Nine Steps, it’s easy to dismiss The Fahrenheit
Twins as a lightweight piece of writing, but that does it a disservice. A
poignant story lurks below the wordplay and humor, even if form does
outshadow content here. Although it operates on a less realistic level, this
last novella has in common with its predecessors if not a happy ending, at least
a hopeful one.
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