Under the Skin by Michel Faber is a novel that slipstreams science fiction, but remains in literary realms due to the author’s careful theming and character journey. His first novel, written when he was forty years old, Faber had returned from Australia with his wife Eva, to the Scottish Highlands. He wrote to heal, through depression and alienation, and dedicates his book to her, “For bringing me back to Earth.”
Isserley drives through the Highlands looking for muscular jocks hitchhiking the A9 road (p.1). The reader, at first, is led to believe she is looking for sex, but as she combs the motorways for loners, and sedates them with icpathua through needles in the seat, it’s clear something more sinister is happening. Back at a farm, ‘workers’ abduct the victim into a building.
The fairy-tale landscape of Scottish mist and sea is a prime setting for strange disappearances and sinister deaths, but it isn’t until near the end of the first chapters of the book that Faber lets slip that Isserley is the witch who fattens up her Hansels for food. Isserley is in fact a livestock manager, handpicking specimens as an edible delicacy on her home planet, an alien surgically re-sculpted to ‘vodsel’ (human) proportions to seduce healthy Earthling prey. Readers are forced to see Earthlings as animals, and aliens as ‘humans.’ The reader must reconsider what cruelty and mercy are when things are upside-down, on a planet that slaughters thousands of animals per second for food.
Based around themes of journey, discovery, boundaries, and territoryii, Faber explores the ideals of ‘the body’ in several directions: sacrifice of the body through transformation (p.63), the body as a sexual tool (p.12), and the destruction of the body through violence (p.182): for food or pleasure (p.90), encompassed in what it means to be in a certain body, ‘under the skin.’
Isserley has sacrificed her original dog-like form to look ‘vodsel’. However, she did not do this for ‘the cause’, but because she fears living underground as a factory worker on her own destroyed planet (p.63). She escaped her fate by agreeing to a new one, which she has not fully considered – her body is now irreversibly vodsel. It’s clear to see parallels with the modern ‘empowered’ woman, claiming to be strong, but resorting to physical maiming to please those they wish to seduce, despite pain or misery.iii
Once captured, vodsels are castrated, glossectomised, and pumped with alien ‘feed’, then butchered and sent on the craft back to her planet as food, a process that Isserley enjoys with a carnal hatred (p.219). She has made the mirror journey herself, ‘dehumanised’ by surgery on her own planet, sent to Earth as an ‘animal’, her body painfully mutilated from a ‘beautiful’ four-legged dog-like female, to a two-legged top- heavy animal she considers repulsive.
Isserley is designed as insurmountably irresistible, because her surgeons have relied on images they fleece from vodsel porn magazines to form her body. Readers may think, as she does (p.178), that she is ludicrously structured, with huge plastic-surgery breasts poised on a knobbly birdlike frame. Faber brings a masculine truth to the fore: Without exception, when faced with even the most ridiculous female figure, every man is attracted to breasts (p.10), even if some part of them finds Isserley repulsive, or wonder if she is ill or disabled. Some of them see something endearing in her too, despite knowing nothing about her (p.12). The surgeons were right.
Faber upends the crime trope of a road-pounding serial killer. Instead of the male loner preying on feminine victims, working-class ruffians and loners are specifically hunted by a young, weak female who judges their worth by muscle mass and disconnection to anyone who might miss them. After all, she plans to eat them.
The reality she prefers to ignore is that she is one of an inexhaustible number of ‘human’ females who want her job (p.241). This is the elephant in the room that destroys her slowly. She can huff and puff all she likes, and she does, internally, but she will never blow down the house made of brick: Vess Incorporated, the dictatorship of her planet. This is symbolized by the strengthening of the main building when the Elite send a message to her colleague Esswis, to paint the farmhouse for Amlis Vess’s visit. Her own small house is in semi-ruins (p.69). When asked at the beginning of her mission by farm workers what she would like doing to the house, she does not allow the men to do anything to make her comfortable. Isserley’s self-destruction is inevitable, her sacrifice made. Like the writer in Knut Hamsun’s Hunger, Isserley’s suicidal tendency is represented by cold, uncomfortable interiors. This from Hamsun’s book, “From where I was standing I had a view of a clothes-line and an open field… The bare room, the floor of which rocked up and down with every step I took across it, seemed like a gasping, sinister coffin. There was no proper fastening to the door… and no stove. I used to lie on my socks at night to dry them a little by the morning…I stood up and searched through a bundle in the corner by the bed for a bite for breakfast, but finding nothing, went back to the window.” p4 Hunger, Penguin Classics 1998.
And now, Isserley’s pitiful home, “Dim light leaked in through a tiny window of filthy frosted glass. A jagged shard of mirror slumped crookedly in the alcove behind the sink, reflecting nothing but peeling paintwork. The bathtub was clean but a little rusty, as was the sink. The yawning interior of the lidless toilet bowl, by contrast, was the colour and texture of bark; it had not been used for at least as long as Isserley had lived here. Pausing only to remove her shoes, Isserley stepped into the ochre-streaked bathtub… as the torrent sputtered out, she was taking off her clothes and letting them fall into the tub around her feet.” (pp. 66-67). The two protagonists go through a journey where they constantly sabotage themselves by not eating properly, going mad with insomnia, not performing their beloved jobs, and deliberately alienating themselves from others who might care about them. They lunge towards whatever comes next with an intent that can only take them a step closer to self-annihilation. The only difference is that Isserley does not choose to take the ‘ship out’ as the protagonist in Hunger does. Even in death, she chooses Earth (p.296).
Faber avoids becoming trapped in the sci-fi genre by not showing certain aspects of the story, in much the same way Kazuo Ishiguro’s equally hybrid novel, Never Let Me Go does. By avoiding genre tropes, the reader never discovers the mechanics of the ship, nor do we visit Isserley’s planet, only glimpsing memories of horror. If we did, we might have to suspend disbelief, and the book could fall into the realms of science fiction.
Ishiguro avoids scientific rigmarole when discussing the program for clone organ donation. By ablating these details, the authors in both cases can set a close point of view, and focus on character journey and transformation.
In both books, the protagonists think their lives privileged. Kathy in Never Let Me Go thinks she is godlike, a clone waiting to donate to ‘normals’ and die young, never grasping she is a harvesting device for the privileged who paid for her existence.
Isserley believes she has won the lottery with her job, as she breathes in the Earth’s smells, studies clouds, talks to sheep, and marvels at snow. But she is one of many factory workers who crave a job on Earth. If she gets sent back, she will never be one of the Elite without her native body. She has no future.
By staying in this close point of view and knowledge boundary of the main character, the reader is not asked to suspend disbelief, only to follow. They do not feel they are in a science-fiction universe, but they of course, are.
What lurks unspoken in both works, although ever-present ‘under the skin’, are the harbingers of demise, and vast, sinister empires of industry hiding in plain sight. In Never Let Me Go, the clones await ‘assignment.’ at The Cottages, a remote farm. Kathy becomes a ‘carer’, looking after the ‘donors’, perpetually tired. “You’re always in a rush, or else you’re too exhausted to have a proper conversation. Soon enough, the long hours, the traveling, the broken sleep have all crept into your being and become part of you…” p.203 paperback, 2010
In Under the Skin, Isserley works inside a boundary of a few hundred miles in her car, also living on an isolated farm, also worn down. “She was feeling ghastly again, exhaustion and an inexplicable misery throbbing in her system like poison.” (p.131). The cut-off locations combined with repetitive action serve to manipulate the protagonist in their universe, and to keep the reader away from any thinking that could stray into ‘mechanics’. If either of these stories took place in a city, the text would surely fall into genre writing by necessity of description. In No Place Else: Explorations In Utopian And Dystopian Fiction, Dr Joseph D. Olander Ph.D. says, “Fictional dystopias are commonly urban, and frequently isolate their characters from all contact with the natural world.” In Under The Skin, the opposite is true: Isserley is consumed by the beauty of Nature, her isolation from civilization (ignorance of reality) her downfall. By omission of the workings of the system she is in, the book concentrates on her path, keeping within the ‘skin’ of literary fiction, and the book’s small world.
This hybrid approach is reflected in the character’s makeup. Faber has created a hybrid woman. ‘Under the skin’, she is alien to Scotland, but is a ‘vodsel’ on the outside, albeit a strange one. As the book progresses, her attitude becomes hybrid. She mentions sayings from vodsels, eat vodsel foods, and resolves to buy vodsel music tapes for her car (p.130). Her fellow countrymen at the farm start to annoy her (p.220).
She spends time with the vodsels in the vodsel world, unlike any of her colleagues. When she burns one victim’s things, she finds a card. “There was an ornate signature, “Pennington Studio” inscribed on the bottom right-hand margin, which struck Isserley as a foreign name, though the vodsel hadn’t sounded foreign to her.” (p.278). This shows that she thinks she is ‘local’ to her Scottish area. What is ‘foreign’ to her but everything on Earth? She is becoming part of her surroundings, but stays alien in that she misunderstands ‘Pennington Studio’ as her victim’s name. The reader knows then she will not survive outside of the farm.
A misreading of the book could be that she softens to her victims’ plight, but Isserley does not think of vodsels as anything but food. Isserley only finds herself loving the planet. Faber does not set a ‘vegetarian manifesto’ as has been suggested in other essaysiv. When the vodsels escape, Isserley takes great delight in chasing them, and willing her colleague Esswis to shoot them. (p.106). She is the one who destroys every trace of them, and it is her fear of losing her job and going back to her planet that drives her to work. She does share something with vodsels –compassion is often missing in them, too. There are some hitchhikers she sees as pathetic. She does not show leniency. She kills them (p. 270).
Isserley’s vain hope is to stay on Earth without reliance on farm supplies because she knows she cannot go on forever. Vess tells her, “‘You think my father is going to come all the way out here and bite you in the neck?… He’ll just send somebody to take your place. There are hundreds of people begging for the chance.’” p.242. This news is devastating, and she knows she must find an escape, to assimilate and survive on Earth. She cannot return to the underground gulags of her home planet.
In Walter Tevis’s book, The Man Who Fell To Earth, Newton is an alien who has sacrificed his life to save Earth before it meets the same fate as his home, Anthea. He struggles. “He felt like a man who had been surrounded by reasonably amiable, silly, and fairly intelligent animals, and has gradually discovered that their concepts and relationships are more complex than his training could have led him to suspect… in one or more of the many aspects of weighing and judging that are available to a high intelligence, the animals who surround him and who foul their own lairs and eat their own filth might be happier and wiser than he.” The Man Who Fell to Earth, Walter Tevis, p.102 paperback 1999.
Isserley’s words are similar when thinking of one of her victims, “Strange how a specimen like him, well-cared for, healthy, free to roam the world, and blessed with a perfection of form which would surely have allowed him to breed with a greater selection of females than average, could still be so miserable. By contrast, other males, scarred by neglect, riddled with diseases, spurned by their kind, were occasionally known to radiate a contentment that seemed to arise from something more enigmatic than mere stupidity.” (pp. 59-60).
Isserley’s social misreading of vodsels is not, however, her downfall. She could be happy on Earth. As with Newton’s crippling alcoholism, the tragedy strikes under the skin: Her digestive system. Like the visitors in War of The Worlds, a grander alien invasion, it is the Earth’s ‘alien’ bacteria that will starve her out. She cannot tolerate vodsel food. The last time she had been adventurous and eaten something meant for vodsels she had ended up in bed for three days.” p. 130.
War of The Worlds concludes, “By virtue of this natural selection of our kind we have developed resisting power… directly they drank and fed, our microscopic allies began to work their overthrow… they were irrevocably doomed, dying and rotting even as they went to and fro. It was inevitable. By the toll of a billion deaths man has bought his birthright of the earth, and it is his against all comers… For neither do men live nor die in vain.”
In the end, Isserley is not made redundant, not murdered, nor captured by police. Faber destroys Isserley on the side of the road, blown into atoms, rejected by her true love, Earth’s nature, the cruellest being of all.
“The indiscriminate, eternal devotion of nature to its numberless particles had an emotional importance for Isserley; it put the unfairness of human life into perspective. Cast ashore, perhaps only briefly before being fetched back… (pp. 61-62).
- http://www.occupyforanimals.net/animal-kill-counter.html
- See slides “Themes”
- Is Cosmetic Surgery The New Acceptable Face of Womanhood?
- http://www.beatrice.com/interviews/faber/
Cate Baum – Excerpt From Under The Skin – An Analysis at Academia.edu
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I enjoyed reading your insightful review. Thank you.