Faith, Hope and Carnage is built around a series of telephone exchanges in lockdown in 2020 between the musician Nick Cave and the journalist Seán O’Hagan. These conversations were later transcribed and arranged as an extended Q&A, and a memoir of sorts, in which Cave reflects on art, music, religion, death, his childhood in Australia and his hell-raising early adulthood.
The audiobook, then, is the project come full circle, with Cave and O’Hagan narrating the text of their conversations. If O’Hagan’s delivery is a little flat at times, it is not a problem that afflicts Cave, who is heartfelt, charismatic and sage-like, even when tackling the most difficult of topics. Threaded through the chapters is his teenage son, Arthur, who died after falling from a cliff in 2015, and the “transformative” impact his death had on Cave. In the months following the accident, he was sent into “a chaos that was also kind of an incapacitation”, though he has since channelled his grief into a new and more empathetic way of being. In 2018, Cave launched The Red Hand Files, a website where he invites people to “ask me anything”. It’s a concept the once publicity-averse singer would previously have found unthinkable, though now he sees human connection and candour as crucial to his ability to carry on.
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