UNDER THE SKIN by Michel Faber (Canongate Books, 2000)
The first time I read this novel, I found it mildly disturbing and extremely distasteful. After having just seen Jonathan Glazer’s loose but still remarkable movie adaptation, I decided to give it another try. This time around I got it!
I can now appreciate what a powerful and brilliantly sustained piece of writing it is. At the same time I can understand what I initially found so off-putting.
Faber’s precise, clinical prose is emotionally detached to the point that he challenges readers to use their own moral compass to decipher the grotesque story of a freakish female extraterrestrial named Isserley who assumes human form to prey upon unsuspecting hitchhikers in the Scottish Highlands.
Initially you think that her motives are sexual as she seeks out muscular men and flashes her surgically enhanced boobs at them. It transpires that her intentions are far more sinister as these beefy men are quite literally wanted for their meat value.
It takes a while to realise what Faber calls human beings are actually fox-like alien creatures from Isserley’s homeland while we Homo sapiens are downgraded to ‘vodsels’ whose grim fate is to be processed into “thin fillets of braised voddissin”. Continue reading
