From our Canongate archives - 18 October 2000
Michel Faber, author of Under the Skin and Some Rain Must Fall wrote the following piece as one of our seven deadly sins articles for the Canongate Prize.
Somewhere in Melbourne, there lives a man who owns what should have been my copy of Chance Meeting On A Dissecting Table Of A Sewing Machine And An Umbrella. I strongly suspect he owns several other items that should have been mine as well, but it all happened so fast I can't be sure.
There's an etiquette that goes with browsing for second-hand records, and one basic rule is that you don't elbow someone violently aside while they're fingering their way through a rack of LPs - even if, before your very eyes, they pull out an obscenely rare record like Nurse With Wound's Chance Meeting On A Dissecting Table Of A Sewing Machine And An Umbrella. Following them out of the store once they've bought it and attacking them in the street is also not allowed. As for asking them nicely if they'd consider selling it to you for twice the price they paid, forget it. That would only give them the pleasure of seeing the look of forlorn yearning in your eyes.
Like love at first sight, when the surroundings fade so that only the two lovers exist, the primal experience of envy reduces and simplifies the world. In that heady moment in Melbourne in 1984, only one thing on earth was worth owning, and the universe chose him to find it and me to stand by and watch him take it.
Sixteen years later, I still regret my loss and his gain, and that regret shames me. What am I doing, envying this man his moment of good luck? Life is crowded with sorrow and cruel disappointment, and we all get our share. This man who owns what should have been my copy of Chance Meeting On A Dissecting Table Of A Sewing Machine And An Umbrella has been through hell since 1984, I can be sure. His evenings aren't spent playing Nurse With Wound records, but more likely pleading with his ex-wife to let him visit his daughter, or working late at a job he hates.
And I? Apart from that Nurse With Wound LP, I have everything I could possibly want. A partner I love and who loves me. A nice warm house that the bank lets me live in for a price I can afford. Plenty to eat. A body that works fine. The best job in the world. E-mails landing in my computer from Norwegian and French translators telling me what a joy it is to work on my book. Two cats purring their heads off right next to me. What's there to envy?
Yes, I know. Chance Meeting On A Dissecting Table Of A Sewing Machine And An Umbrella. But I've learned what happens when at last I lay my hands on a long-coveted record. I file it away amongst all my other squares of cardboard and plastic, pulling it out for a play every year or two. Stripped of the aura that envy conferred upon it, a rare LP, like all material possessions, becomes benign and ordinary. The only thing that can restore its potency, its halo of charismatic value, is a visit from a burglar.
I'm not by nature a highly envious person. People who win the lottery, or who are given a fortune for telling a TV presenter what's the capital of Iceland, don't raise my blood pressure. The thought of the world's bookshops dumping my work to make more room for the latest literary Big Mac is one I accept with serenity. The Royal Family, The Spice Persons and the head of BT are welcome to submerge their heads in the trough and guzzle as much as they want, as long as there aren't any Nurse With Wound LPs in there.
What I do envy, self-possessed control freak that I am, is other people's ability to lose themselves in unfettered delight. Perhaps every writer of fiction suspects himself or herself to be a cold fish at heart, a mere spectator of other people's joys and passions. The voice of envy tells me that I can never enjoy anything as much as you do - Yes, you! When I go to rock concerts, I'm never tempted to wave my arms around, shout approval, sing along or even tap my foot. Yet all around me, I see rapture: men behaving as if they've been plugged into a power socket, women behaving as if they're being stroked to orgasm by the middle finger of God. Why am I so immune to transcendence? Why can't I switch off my analytical faculties for a few minutes and let myself be carried away? No chance.
This, then, is my envy, which goes much deeper than the hankering I still have to find, in a charity shop one day, my lost Chance Meeting On A Dissecting Table Of A Sewing Machine And An Umbrella.
Michel Faber has written seven other books, including the highly acclaimed The Crimson Petal and the White, The Fahrenheit Twins and the Whitbread-shortlisted novel Under the Skin. The Apple, based on characters in The Crimson Petal and the White, was published in 2006. He has also written two novellas, The Hundred and Ninety-Nine Steps (2001) and The Courage Consort (2002), and has won several short-story awards, including the Neil Gunn, Ian St James and Macallan. Born in Holland, brought up in Australia, he now lives in the Scottish Highlands.
