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Faith, Hope and Carnage, Nick Cave and Seán O’Hagan (Canongate, 2022)
Posted on 13th November, 2023 in Book Review
I first heard of Nick Cave’s book when I read an interview he did with the former Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, in The Sunday Times (5 March 2023). I didn’t know much about Cave, and I knew very little of his music (apart from the brilliant Red Right Hand on Peaky Blinders). My husband is a fan though. Years ago he went to see him in concert in Lucca and came back incredibly excited because Cave, leaning into the audience, had RESTED HIS HAND ON HIS SHOULDER!
In his discussion with Rowan Williams, Cave talked about loss, grief, religion, creativity, his fascination with the Bible and Jesus, despair, life, death…but a list of topics hardly does justice to his ideas and his expression of them, to the questioning, seeking spirit his words revealed. Nor does it give any sense of his openness, or of the way he threw out so many intriguing ideas without any sense they were dogmas or set in stone. I had to know more – so I bought the book.
Faith, Hope and Carnage is the record of conversations between Cave and the journalist Seán O’Hagan. It opens with Cave announcing that he hates interviews (they, “in general, suck”), but he likes conversations. What follows, conversationally, is an exploration of, well, faith, hope and carnage, an expansion of the areas he touched on in the interview with Williams. His thoughts on bereavement and how you live after it, how you cope with the silence around it, with refusing to act as if the dead person never lived at all, are perhaps the most resonant for me. Grief is a club no one wants to join, but once you’re in it you discover its membership is vast. But Cave also insists on seeing grief as a gift, “a defiant, sometimes mutinous energy”.
But I’m not going to attempt to summarise the book or Cave’s ideas. I’d probably get him wrong if I did; really it’s best to read it (especially if you want some suggestions about why we shouldn’t despair, or why we should have compassion). I’ve started listening to some of his music as a result of reading the book – I love Idiot Prayer: Nick Cave Alone at Alexandra Palace. A man who can open a song with the words “I don’t believe in an interventionist God” (Into My Arms) is a man I think is worth listening to!
I’ve also enjoyed reading the Red Hand Files where he says “you can ask me anything”, and he does answer. He gives, for example, a brilliant response to a question about AI and creativity; a songwriter “who is using ChatGPT to write ‘his’ lyrics because it is ‘faster and easier’ is participating in [the] erosion of the world’s soul and the spirit of humanity itself and, to put it politely, should fucking desist if he wants to continue calling himself a songwriter”.
I was recently asked to nominate my three favourite reads of 2023 for Shepherd.com. Faith, Hope and Carnage was one of them.
Nick Cave, The Red Hand Files (the AI one is https://www.theredhandfiles.com/chatgpt-making-things-faster-and-easier/ )