Faith, Hope, and Carnage

There was a time, long ago, when Nick Cave was the frontman for a post-punk band labeled “the most violent live band in the world.” His struggles with addiction and recovery took place in the public eye. He had a nasty reputation. But as I said, that was a long time ago.

In recent years, after enduring the tragic deaths of two sons, the 66-year-old Australian artist has undergone a transformation. For one thing, he returned to church. And he has become “a frank and eloquent interlocutor on grief.” Every day, people from around the world write to Cave with questions and he regularly writes back, publicly, through what he calls The Red Hand Files. (If you’re unacquainted, take a moment to read this and this.)

This book is in some sense an extension of that vital project. Drawn from more than 40 hours of conversation with the journalist Seán O'Hagan, this is a jarringly raw, thoroughly honest, and endlessly searching book. It’s about trying to cobble together some semblance of meaning in the wake of incomprehensible loss. It’s about naming the loss for what it is. And crucially, it’s about not letting the tragedy have the last word.

Faith, Hope, and Carnage is dark, no getting around that. It’s also, paradoxically or not, really hopeful. It’s my favorite book of the year.

“You either go under, or it changes you, or, worse, you become a small, hard thing that has contracted around an absence. Sometimes you find a grieving person constricted around the thing they have lost; they’ve become ossified and impossible to penetrate, and, well, other people go the other way, and grow open and expansive . . .

It seems, for some of us, the religious experience awaits the devastation or a trauma, not to bring you happiness or comfort, necessarily, but to bring about an expansion of the self – the possibility to expand as a human being, rather than contract. And, afterwards, we feel a compulsion, too, a need to pass the message on like missionaries of grief or something.”