‘The new south coast’: Compassion in extreme landscapes in Michel Faber’s short fiction

Michel Faber has been writing short fiction for 50 years. His works are hugely various – some fantastic, some realist, and he is known for an unusual restlessness across genre, also for unusual blends of genre within individual stories. But there are key commonalities to be found, also some very consistent patterns, over hundreds of his individual pieces. Often, his stories are set in extreme, faraway or otherwise alien landscapes, exploring a consistent emotional territory concerned with the search for connection between humans, animals and places. This article traces the reasons why he has kept returning to extreme settings, using four case studies to interrogate those commonalities. It interrogates two of his most celebrated, earlier stories, ‘Fish’ and ‘The Fahrenheit Twins’, then turns to two newer stories to explore Faber’s consistency of concern: ‘A Million Infant Breaths’ and ‘The Morning After’.