The Courage Consort: Three Novellas

Not one of these three earnest novellas really appealed to me--yet I cherished and treasured all of them. The various characters were flawed (as are all characters), and their subsequent interactions and conflict mundane, yet I still remained transfixed as I turned each page. Let's see: a singing ensemble, an insecure anthropologist, and two tiny twins above the Artic Circle. . .none of the above really interests me. Yet Michel Faber's amazing gift with the written word made his three-novella collection, named THE COURAGE CONSORT, an absolutely spellbinding, mystical, existential, and satisfying reading experience. The "Guardian" of London says of Faber: "This is a man who could give Conrad a run at writing the perfect sentence." Darn right. Faber's writing is clean, concise, compelling--a fluid nirvana of perfectly-matched nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs, prepositions. The prose is nothing short of brilliant: the author manipulates the English language like a sorcerer waving an hpynotic wand. The result: reading that rolls off the tip of the tongue, like sampling a wine of inestimable value. Faber is good, very good; this novella collection is positively as riveting as his post-Victorian masterpiece, "The Crimson Petal And The White." As a matter of fact, Faber has demonstrated, via his surreal prose, that he has grown even more as a writer--which makes reading him the epitome of literary pleasure. --D. Mikels, Author, WALK-ON

While none of these three small gems is as dazzling as Faber's wonderful novel, "The Crimson Petal and the White," each is memorable for its completeness of vision and exquisite writing. Whether it's a rented villa in Belgium, an archaeological dig in England or a fairy tale expanse of arctic isolation, Faber draws the reader deep into his imagined world. The most arresting novella is the last, and the briefest, "The Fahrenheit Twins." A dark, humorous, and ultimately creepy Hansel and Gretel tale, it centers on twins identical in all but gender. "There was even the same amount of light inside their eyes, a difficult thing to reproduce exactly." Born on an arctic island, their births unrecorded, they are a secret from the wider world. Their parents, anthropologists studying an indigenous tribe, are often absent and when home are usually otherwise occupied. The children have never met any other human beings, but they have developed a satisfying private culture centered on rituals and magic. Determined to remain identical and inseparable forever, their most important ceremony is one created to ward off the inevitability of adolescence, which their mother has warned them of. And their most important object is a "Book of Knowledge," in which they "pieced together an impression of who their mother might be," by recording the 100 sentences or so she addresses to them in the course of a year. When their mother dies, the children address this cataclysm by pondering a suitably grave and momentous ritual. It will involve a quest in which much is discovered, absorbed and acted upon. Faber uses the difference between the protagonists' and the reader's knowledge to enchant, startle, and dismay. The most involving novella is "The Hundred and Ninety-Nine Steps," which are the number of steps archaeologist Sian climbs each morning to the Whitby Abbey where she participates in the exhumation and cataloguing of an old abbey cemetery. Sian, her sleep nightly haunted by a murderer who slits her throat in her dreams, wakes each morning to unspoken fears over a painful lump in her hip. Lonely and still recovering from a horrific Bosnian War experience, Sian's work is all consuming until the day she meets a handsome cynic and his delightful dog. The dog's open and unself-conscious affection captivates Sian immediately. Her attraction to the man is naturally more problematic, but his tantalizing possession of an old bundle of papers unites them in an effort to sate their curiosity. As Sian painstakingly deciphers the ancient, crumbly papers, a murder mystery begins to unfold, and exacerbates their differences. Magnus never comes as alive as Sian - he seems more of a sparring partner and a physical presence, at least until the end, but the story is full of surprises and insights. In the title novella, "The Courage Consort," Faber induces to the reader to identify with his characters without necessarily warming to any of them. The story concerns an a cappella sin

Michel Faber's 2002 novel THE CRIMSON PETAL AND THE WHITE was a sprawling, splendid novel, large in scale and hefty in size. His new offering, THE COURAGE CONSORT, contains three novellas no less dazzling, despite their shorter length and smaller scope. In the title novella, the Courage Consort is "the seventh-most-renowned serious vocal ensemble in the world." Secluded in a Belgian chateau to rehearse a fiendishly difficult piece by a contemporary composer, the five singers soon reveal that their relationships are as dissonant as the music they perform. When tragedy strikes, the members of the Courage Consort, particularly Catherine Courage, must reevaluate their commitments to their music and to each other. The second novella, entitled "The Hundred and Ninety-Nine Steps," is set in the medieval English city of Whitby. Siân is a young archaeologist who --- literally and figuratively --- carries remnants of war-torn Bosnia with her, and who is haunted each night by dreams "of being first seduced, then murdered." She soon meets an alluring stranger named Magnus who, despite his ancient name, ridicules the history that Siân reveres. The two of them uncover a two-hundred-year-old "murder" mystery with a surprising twist. In the final novella "The Fahrenheit Twins" is a boy named Marko'cain and a girl named Tainto'lilith. Raised in a frigid climate by their anthropologist parents studying a polar tribe, the two are growing up in an atmosphere of "benign neglect." Left primarily to their own devices, and without any external cultural or social influences, the two develop their own set of primitive rituals and superstitions. When their mother dies, the two children set off to "wait for a signal from the universe as to the best thing to do with the body." In this modern-day Hansel and Gretel tale, the siblings' quest leads them to reevaluate their assumptions about their parents' relationships, the nature of their work, and the structure of their family. In each of these brief novellas, Faber constructs a wholly developed world, whether it be a bleak polar outpost or a claustrophobic Belgian forest. These settings help envelop the reader in the story and create an environment as rich and lush as any full-length novel. With THE COURAGE CONSORT, Faber proves himself a master of creating imaginative, engrossing fiction, whether slight or sprawling. --- Reviewed by Norah Piehl

In this collection of three wildly divergent novellas Faber creates varied and vividly imagined worlds where the central/core theme is one of survival and renewal. Each masterfully written segment is amazing in its own way - multi-layered, absorbing, rich with an air of menace (unsettling), and a recurring habit of smashing all notions of predictability. The surprises blindsided me every time. My favorite novella was 'The Hundred and Ninety-Nine Steps' about a strange isolated woman on an archaeological dig. However, all three stories left a strong impression. It must have been nice for Mr. Faber to work on some shorter pieces after his mammoth novel 'The Crimson Petal and the White'.