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PRINT Eve Hawksworth Luke Warde Whether you agree
or disagree, there is something truly compelling, as well as disarming, about how he describes his faith. Is Mother Dead Vigdis Hjorth [Verso Books] Faith, Hope and Carnage Nick Cave and Sean O’Hagan [Canongate] The title of Is Mother Dead, Vigdis Hjorth’s new novel, is a clue to its elliptical and maddening contents. A question without question mark – without complaint, plea or pitch – it voices the uncertain grammar of one troubled mother-daughter relationship. The story’s narrator Johanna left Norway and her controlling family in her twenties, seeking a new life as an artist in Utah. At first, she and her mother remain in sporadic contact. But when Johanna’s provocative painting Mother and Child is exhibited in Oslo, and she doesn’t attend her father’s funeral, the two become estranged. Now in her sixties, widowed and ruminating on the past, Johanna returns to Oslo for a career retrospective. Despite repeated protestations that the turmoil ‘has all burned itself out in me now’, she becomes fixated on her mother and their lapsed relationship. Is Mother Dead returns to the theme of family discord that animated Hjorth’s Will and Testament. It lacks the gravity of the earlier work, in which the rift centres on an accusation of sexual abuse. Is Mother Dead allows Hjorth greater scope to explore the psychology of a fractious intimacy. Johanna’s thoughts are conveyed in a breathless style which is both confiding and, like the book’s title, halting. Just as the reader may begin to feel tormented, Hjorth uses Johanna’s obsessions to propel the plot into a brilliant exposition of the contradictions of motherhood. EH Audaciously, Faith, Hope and Carnage, an illuminating collection of what look like interviews – the interlocutors, I imagine, would prefer something more dignified, like ‘conversation’ or ‘dialogue’ – opens with Nick Cave scoffing: ‘interviews, in general, suck. Really, they eat you up. I hate them.’ It’s not hard to see why someone like Cave, whose life has involved both tumult and tragedy, would think this way. He’s a rock star, after all, and interviews with rock stars tend to devolve into lusty hunts for excess. You’ll find little sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll in this book, whose title references the three theological virtues: faith, hope and charity. At one point, an exasperated Cave tells O’Hagan, his friend: “I really don’t like talking about drugs. I just find it so, I don’t know, tired and uninteresting.” For anyone who wasn’t aware, religion is a salient feature of Cave’s life. And by ‘religion’ he means religion. Cave is a practicing Christian and a true believer; this isn’t the kind of vague, fair-weather spirituality, or flirtation with ‘mindfulness’, many have come to associate with celebrities worn down by a guilty conscience. Whether you agree or disagree, there is something truly compelling, as well as disarming, about how he describes his faith. He’s considered all the usual objections – he’s no naïf – and the position he’s arrived at is a kind of sophisticated utilitarianism, an embracing of an absurdity he considers enriching, both on an individual and artistic level: ‘the songs I write today tend to be religious songs in the broadest sense. They behave as if God exists. They are essentially making a case for belief itself.’ Cave is under no illusions as to what brought him here. ‘The thing that happened that changed everything was that Arthur died.’ In July 2015, Cave’s son, Arthur, died tragically after falling from a cliff near Brighton. Some of the book’s richest sections have Cave reflecting on the devastat52 ing impact this had on both him and his wife Susie. Take the following, on the often ignored physicality of sudden, traumatic loss: ‘I had this feeling that the grief was pounding through my body with an inaudible roar, and despair was bursting through the tips of my fingers. I remember, in desperation, reaching across and taking Susie’s hand and feeling the shock of that same violent electricity in her hand… We tend to see grief as an emotional state, but it is also an atrocious destabilising assault on the body.’ Much of the book will appeal to aficionados of Cave and his band, The Bad Seeds. There are insightful reflections on his astonishingly symbiotic relationship with Warren Ellis, his key collaborator, and a notable emphasis on his most recent and future work. In general, he seems averse to nostalgia: ‘talking about this stuff, the past, all these stories, feels like I am speaking about a different person, a different life. It feels like I am recounting stories from across a deep divide.’ The best, perhaps, is yet to come. LW