Undying: A Love Story

By Michel Faber

(Canongate: £12.99)

EVA Youren, wife of the writer Michel Faber, was 59 when she died from cancer two years ago this month. Her duel with what the oncologist Siddhartha Mukherjee has described as “the emperor of all maladies” was epic as Youren struggled for many years to overcome an enemy that is as malign, ugly, inventive and indiscriminate as Daesh. Just when you think one attack has been successfully repelled another emerges where and when you least expect it. It is akin to fighting a guerrilla war.

Like us all, Youren wanted fiercely to live and did whatever it took to make that possible. She was not prepared – pace Dylan Thomas – to go gentle into that good night. Her response to the news that she had a terminal disease, myeloma, an incurable cancer of the bone marrow, was to rage, rage, and rage against the dying of the light. As those who celebrated her life at a remarkable funeral service can attest, she was the kind of woman whose glass seemed always to be overflowing.

She and Faber lived in the former railway station at Fearn, near Tain. A few trains still stop there as they pass through on their way to Wick. It is the kind of setting – big skies, broad fields, few folk – I imagined on the one occasion I visited the couple, that would be perfect for the filming of that awful scene in Anna Karenina when the heroine throws herself in front of a train.

Youren and Faber arrived in the north-east of Scotland from Australia on a whim and eager to establish roots. While he wrote, she taught and made art. Undying is sub-titled A Love Story, confirmation of which is to be found in every poem of a collection that will send sales of hankies soaring. Faber, the author of the novels Under The Skin and The Crimson Petal And The White, has not previously published poetry but that he is a poet is apparent from the first to last page in this brilliant and beautiful book.

He is following in the tradition of generations of writers who, on the death of loved ones, seek consolation the only way they know how. One thinks particularly of Thomas Hardy and the poems he poured out after the death of his wife Emma and of Douglas Dunn’s Elegies, written in 1981 in the aftermath of his wife Lesley’s death, also from cancer. In his introduction to Undying, Faber recalls that even as late as June, 2014, he and Youren had hopes that a new chemotherapy drug would buy her more time. “With luck, she would get at least six months’ remission in which to go home, be reunited with the cats, tidy her affairs, sort through family photographs, maybe go on one last overseas trip to see her sons.”

In this brief window of optimism he read his poem Old Bird, Not Very Well to the oncologist, which he had written in 1999 long before Youren was diagnosed. Thereafter he wrote only two poems before her death, Cowboys (Together last night we/ laboured to clean your teeth”) and Nipples: (“Your flesh is riotous with the pleasure/ of predatory cells./ Each nipple swells a bit more each day./ I have decided/ to watch the one on your foot.”) Following it, poems came to him at intervals, occasionally in spasms of five a day. “I hadn’t known such need for poetry before. I wish I’d lived into my 90s, with Eva at my side, and never written these things.”

The collection comprises 67 poems and is broadly chronological in structure. It is thus a chronicle of a death foretold, blue-veined with gallows humour, stark observation and unflinching, painful honesty. Faber spares his readers – and himself – nothing as we follow the inevitable progress of an unconquerable disease. His wife’s body, he writes, “will become a death chamber”. He notes the tumours on her scalp, the sweat and blood stains on her many wigs. A former nurse, he reveals, too, how ironically he helped her in the early days of her ordeal: “Feeling guilty./Feeling anxious./ Feeling small./ Banging my head, for real against a wall.”

His pain is palpable, his sense of impotence overwhelming, the depth of his loss unfathomable. He is a man adrift in a leaky boat. His writing, however, remains poised, as if he has made a pact with himself not to let go, to hold on to the control that makes him such a wonderful writer. This is how Faber wants to remember his Eva, and how he wants the world to. In Tight Pullover he details how he watched while “two guys in fancy suits” prepared her body to be taken to the mortuary. Later, reminiscing in You Loved To Dance, he mourns that they danced too rarely: “I did my best to lay my hang-ups down/ and shake my tight teetotal ass.”

We are in death’s dominion. Like the procession through an airport, it has it peculiar routine, its own punctuation, from life BC (before cancer) to life AD (after death). In My First Date After You, Faber remembers the occasion when he went out with another woman. In Brussels, his hotel room is burgled and his camera – Eva’s camera – is stolen. Seeing an elderly couple get on a train, he writes: “My love, had you not died/ but lived another twenty, thirty years,/ these two old dears might have been us.” This is how a poet’s grief manifests itself, in simple words, the story of a life and a wife.