Book review: Faber & Faber: The Untold Story, By Toby Faber

This is a terrible admission for the books editor of a national newspaper to have to make, but, in spite of my best efforts, I find that I am unable to remain completely impartial when it comes to books published by Faber & Faber. Perhaps it’s because I still have a surprisingly clear memory of my Dad buying me a copy of The Iron Man by Ted Hughes when I was small (my still-learning to-read brain silently pronounced his second name “Hudgis” for a long time before it realised its mistake), or perhaps it’s because so many of the books I studied at school and university featured that iconic, Pentagram-designed double-f device: poetry collections by TS Eliot and Douglas Dunn; plays by Brian Friel and Samuel Beckett; novels by William Golding and Peter Carey. Whatever the reason, whenever I’m opening the books mail at The Scotsman and I see a jiffy bag with the Faber logo on it, I get a small but undeniable Pavlovian buzz. It’s not that I’m incapable of giving a Faber book a bad review – I can think of at least a couple – it’s more that there’s a certain, uniquely serious aura attached to the Faber brand. As Seamus Heaney put it, when reflecting on what it felt like to receive a letter from Faber informing him that they were going to publish his debut collection, Death of a Naturalist, “I just couldn’t believe it, it was like getting a letter from God the Father.”