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.
“Collective grief can bring extraordinary change, a kind of conversion of the spirit,” he says, in a broader reflection on humanity. “We can seize this opportunity or we can squander it and let it pass us by. I hope it is the former … I have a hope that in time we can come together, even though, right now, we could not be further apart.”
• Faith, Hope and Carnage is available from Canongate, 8hr and 38min
Further listening
Hello Beautiful
Ann Napolitano, Penguin Audio, 15hr 6min
ER actor Maura Tierney narrates this sweeping update of Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women about the life and loves of four Chicago sisters.
Killing Thatcher
Rory Carroll, HarperCollins, 11hr 51min
The veteran journalist’s meticulous and gripping account of the IRA bombing of Brighton’s Grand Hotel, where Margaret Thatcher and the British cabinet were staying, is read by actor Gary Trainor.
