Faber’s first novel tears away protective layers of propriety, leaving the flesh and bone of society quivering and in full view. The realisation that something strange is going on is immediate, as the reader is confronted with the mysteriously repugnant alien Isserley, who scours the Scottish Highlands, under the command of her superiors, in search of beefy male hitchhikers.
Her freakish appearance (thick glasses, crooked spine, disproportionately large breasts) is the result of painful operations, yet offers a bizarre erotic appeal, which allows Isserley to snag her victims and send them to The Farm for “processing”.
This sounds gruesome and gratuitous, yet the beauty of his novel relies on our gradual realisation of Faber’s gist. He combines the fantastic, in the form of Isserley’s race, and the familiar, epitomised by the domestic vignettes of Isserley’s passengers, so that the one aspect emphasises the other and we appreciate the complexity and strangeness of both.
“The monster without is the monster within” is a common literary theme, recalling Frankenstein and Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, but Faber provides a modern twist by examining how we deal with “monsters”, personal or otherwise, through the eyes of a protagonist who, though frightful in form, embodies the complex paradoxes of the human condition.
This is re-enforced by the fact that Isserley refers to her own race as “humans”, while our own species are “vodsels”, and the manner in which she justifies her actions towards “vodsels” reflects our own treatment not only of animals but also of other races and different religions. Faber, therefore, provides an exploration of our own predatory nature and even, despite our strong disapproval of her actions, manages to stir sympathy for Isserley in her moral dilemma.
Under the Skin, then, works on a number of levels and is far more than a cheap thriller; in his discussion of the sometimes unavoidable objectification of one species by another, Faber provokes us to continually reassess our moral stance, making this a gripping, if not immediately gratifying, read.ARCHIVE: 3rd week TT 2004
Michael Faber Under The Skin
