On 14 July 2015, Nick Cave’s life changed irrevocably when his 15-year-old son, Arthur, died after falling from a sea cliff near the family’s home in Brighton. The grief this unleashed was absolute, immersive, a brutal upending of both body and soul that Cave remembers with devastating clarity: “Grief was pounding through my body with an audible roar, and despair was bursting through the tips of my fingers… We tend to see grief as an emotional state, but it is also an atrocious destabilising assault upon the body. So much so that it can feel terminal.” From the outset, and whether he liked it or not, Cave’s grief was a public affair. He and Susie, his fashion designer wife of 23 years, were forced to issue a brief public statement appealing for privacy after the death of their “beautiful, happy, loving boy”. You dearly hope the tabloids respected it.
How does anyone survive such a loss? What helps make life worth living? Cave, whose relationship with journalists has sometimes been fraught and tumultuous, could easily have withdrawn into reclusive misery. Instead, he has written and talked his way through his grief, embarking on a seven-year embrace of increasingly radical candour that has culminated in this astonishing book. Faith, Hope and Carnage is the distillation of more than 40 hours of conversation between Cave, now 65, and the Observer journalist Sean O’Hagan, recorded during the enforced listlessness of the pandemic in 2020 and 2021. Nothing but nothing is out of bounds. The section, for example, in which Cave recalls the events of the day when they learned of Arthur’s death is almost too honest to bear reading. “There is not a song or a word or a stitch of thread that is not asking for forgiveness, that is not saying we are just so sorry,” he says of himself and Susie, still haunted by the guilt that, as Arthur’s father, “he was my responsibility and I looked away at the wrong time, that I wasn’t sufficiently vigilant”.
With wit, passion and restless intelligence, Cave and O’Hagan discuss love, death, heroin addiction, pottery, childhood, religion and the inscrutable alchemy of songwriting. But in the end, every word orbits Arthur, the boy whose absence became a galvanising life force for his father. For Cave is a man on a mission. Battered and burnished by loss, taken to “the very limits of suffering”, what he has learned in his grief is too precious, too important not to share compulsively. “We are, each of us, imperilled,” he says, “insofar as anything can turn catastrophic at any time, personally, for each of us… We are all, at some point in our lives, obliterated by loss. If you haven’t been by now, you will be in time – that’s for sure.” The brutality of knowing that we are mortal creatures – that everything and everyone we love in this world will, one way or another, slip like water from our grasp – has instilled in Cave a kind of reckless wonder. Because for all our vulnerability, he notes, we keep on loving. We keep taking risks with our hearts and laying them wide open to loss. This shared “predicament of an imperilled life” has made Cave love his fragile, hopeful, doomed fellow humans as never before. He only really became a person, he believes, after his son died: “It was as if the experience of grief enlarged my heart in some way.”
Tiny acts of kindness from others – something as small as the purposeful squeeze of a stranger’s hand – were vital in helping Cave and his wife out of their despair, showing them that: “The world is not animated by evil as we are so often told, but by love, and that despite the suffering of the world, or maybe in defiance of it, people mostly just cared.” In turn, he now strives to help strangers himself through his music, his writing and, in particular, the Red Hand Files, the online forum through which anyone can ask him any question at all, and he will answer a selection with spectacular openness.
Cave’s prevailing message is one of hope. He believes our actions reverberate through the world in ways we will never know. Having been through hell himself, it means something when he says: “The luminous and shocking beauty of the everyday is something I try to remain alert to, if only as an antidote to the chronic cynicism and disenchantment that seem to surround everything, these days. It tells me that, despite how debased or corrupt we are told humanity is, and how degraded the world has become, it just keeps on being beautiful. It can’t help it.”
Amen to that. This beautiful book is a lament, a celebration, a howl, a secular prayer, a call to arms, a meditation and an exquisite articulation of the human condition. It will take your breath away.
Rachel Clarke is a palliative care doctor and the author of Breathtaking: Inside the NHS in a Time of Pandemic
• Faith, Hope and Carnage by Nick Cave and Sean O’Hagan is published by Canongate (£20). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
