Interview: Michel Faber

“I've wanted to write a book about music since I first realised, as a teenager, how different my relationship with sounds was from other people's,” says Michel Faber. “I didn't know I was on the spectrum then, but I could tell that I wasn't hearing things the usual way. Then I got side-tracked for about 50 years writing novels and so on.”

This helps contextualise Faber’s new book Listen: On Music, Sound and Us, the 64-year-old’s first full-length work of non-fiction in a career which has up until now been famous for his fiction novels, including Under the Skin (2000; adapted to film by Jonathan Glazer in 2013), The Crimson Petal and the White (2002) and The Book of Strange New Things (2014).

Listen is not a side project or a playful offshoot of his regular work, but a personal and very relatable exploration of Faber’s own obsession with music, and his evolving life’s journey with it as a companion. As the title suggests, it’s an attempt to rationalise what often remains ethereal about the experience of listening.

“I'm glad it took me so long to get round to writing Listen, because I was able to let go of delusions about the objective superiority of my tastes and start to investigate what taste really is and how we acquire it,” he says. “The media tries to convince us that there is naturally good music which intrinsically cool humans recognise as good, and naturally bad music which uncool humans fail to see is bad. If you can let go of that fallacy, your listening life becomes more interesting, I think.

“People use music to establish and reinforce their identity, their tribal allegiances, their social status and so on, so it can involve an enormous amount of anxiety, shame, defensiveness and prejudice against others. I'm hoping that Listen may help people step back from all that and be more ‘themselves’. Our lives are quite short, and it's such a pity if you waste time and energy pretending to love things you don't like.”

The experience of writing about music appears to have been more of a challenge for Faber than creating fictional worlds. “To be honest, the book broke my heart because there were hundreds of pages I had to cut out of it,” he says. “There just wasn't room. In my fiction, I always knew what would fit and what wouldn't – I wasn't one of those writers who has to chuck chapters or even whole novels in the bin, but music defeated me. It's just too huge a topic.”

This depth of subject matter, however, should promise a diverse and interesting Edinburgh International Book Festival event. “I want to involve the audience as early in the session as I possibly can,” he says. “Every event I've done for Listen has been remarkably different, because we all have such individual relationships with music. I want to honour that, not only because it's more fun that way, but because one of the implicit messages of Listen is that we don't have to listen to authorities handing down their wisdoms about what you should admire.”

At the moment, he tells me, Faber is listening to a compilation of gospel music by artists including Mighty Voices Of Wonder, the Gospel Comforters, the Spiritual Harmonizers and others. “I'm still trying to understand that weird cultural phenomenon of sophisticated white people adoring this kind of music, even though they find evangelistic Christianity repugnant and reject everything that these gospellers are trying to get across,” he says. “There’s so much to unpack there, it’s fascinating…”

Show: Michel Faber: New Ways of Hearing

Venue: EFI Courtyard Theatre

Time: 10.45am-11.45am, 14 Aug