📘 Michel Faber, Under the Skin (2000)

Last month, I read Michel Faber's 2000 novel, Under the Skin, for the very first time. I'd watched the film adaptation by Jonathan Glazer back in 2013, and at the time, I'd enjoyed it. But as I've written before, the gulf between a novel and its cinematic counterpart(s) tends to be wide; my experience of reading the novel accompanied by my memories of the film confirmed this, again.

This time, however, I'm not interested in discussing the intricacies of adaptation, mainly because the last time I watched Under the Skin was almost a decade ago, and I do not trust my memory enough to compare the two iterations on its terms. This time, I want to talk about the novel, its popular reception, and what it reminded me of.

Here's the novel, quick and dirty; Isserly is a a young woman who drives up and down the A9 in Scotland, picking up hitch-hikers. Her taste in travelling companions is very specific, she only wants tall, athletic men. At first, this is played as if she were seeking out sexual partners — a sort of cruising for heterosexuals, if you will — but it is gradually revealed that Isserly is, in fact, hunting men in order to tranquilise and transfer them to a facility hidden underneath a farm along the Scottish shore. At the facility, Isserly's victims are fattened and then processed into meat for consumption by the elite of an alien species on a planet, far, far away, and Isserly's sexuality is nothing but a tool in her hunter's arsenal.

Through this narrative, the novel explores questions of beauty and sexual politics; Isserly is desirable, she has been surgically altered to be desirable, her breasts are emphasised over and over again, Isserly emphasises her own breasts while she sizes up her prospective prey, they keep the men interested, distracting them from their impending doom. But this desirability comes at a price, Isserly's body, her alien body, has been disfigured beyond recognition. The aliens, who refer to themselves as humans, resemble mammalian quadrupeds, Isserly on the other hand has been reshaped into a biped to better blend into her surroundings. The majority of her fur, her mammary glands and genitalia have been removed, and her body has been modified to approximate that of terrestrial homo sapiens sapiens. These modifications are accompanied by pain and progressive disability if Isserly fails to adhere to certain excercise routines, that too, while holding down a full-time job.

The matter of Isserly's work is quite central to Under the Skin as well, it elucidates the paradigm of labour on the alien world; Isserly and her colleagues are employees for a very large corporation on their home planet, and while her job allows her to dwell on the surface of the earth, the other aliens, who retain their quadrupedal appearance, work underground in what can only be described as an assembly line at a slaughterhouse. At one point, after Isserly is sexually assaulted by a homo sapiens sapiens (or vodsel, as the aliens call them), in a fit of rage, she demands to watch the men being prepared for fattening, hoping that the torture will sublimate her feelings of fear and helplessness. Here, we as readers learn some of the intricacies of the production process, in a sequence that mirrors the process described in Agustina Bazterrica's 2017 novel, Cadáver Exquisito, which was translated into English as Tender is the Flesh in 2020. This moment however, is an exception for Isserly, she usually prefers to isolate herself from her species, partially because she is the only woman among them, and horribly mutilated in their terms, but more importantly because she considers herself a cut above the rabble that they are. Class divisions run deep on Isserly's home planet — literally — the elite live on the ravaged surface of the planet, luxuriating in insulated domiciles, while the poor toil endlessly underground. Isserly's origins on this planet were humble, but in her quadrupedal form, she was beautiful, allowing her to rub shoulders with the elite before she came of age. She had hoped her social connections would spare her from the drudgery of toil, but as the events of the novel show, this was not to be, and the reason Isserly is on earth, barely resembling a member of her own species, is because it is an escape from the eternal toil at the depths of her own planet. Isserly's enduring feelings of disdain are two-pronged, directed at the vodsels she hunts, and at her own people, whom she distances herself from at every turn.

Perhaps that recapitulation was a bit dirtier than it was quick, and so far, I've largely echoed the consensus expressed in other reviews I've found, albeit from my particular perspective, right down to the comparison with Tender is the Flesh (I'll link all the reviews I've read at the end), but one aspect of the book was conspicuously absent from each and every one of these reviews: colonialism. None of the reviews I read seemed to grasp the fact that Isserly's species comprised a colonising entity on Earth, certainly an advance guard, a mere landing party, but a colonising force nonetheless. The reviews often speak of the wonder Isserly feels standing on the shores of Northern Scotland, comparing the Earth's pristine natural beauty to the environmental catastrophe her planet has grown into, they then go on to equate it with questions of the contemporary ecological destruction caused by capitalism, but none of them compare it to the discourses of the colonial projects that exploited and decimated the so called "untouched lands" of North America, South America, Africa, and Asia.

And the question of colonialism is not one that is alien to science fiction at all, one might even cite the phenomenon as one of the catalysts for its emergence, as John Rieder does in Colonialism and the Emergence of Science Fiction. As Rieder puts it, writers of science fiction such as H.G. Wells turned the tables on the imperial civilisation of Britain in works such as War of the Worlds to extrapolate on the violence of colonialism, in it, London is invaded by hostile aliens seeking the destruction of humanity; their invasion is also promulgated but the fact that Mars, their home world is very quickly becoming uninhabitable. To be clear, Wells' narrative is still organised in terms of colonial discourse, but the reversal reveals the critical potential of science fiction. A review of Under the Skin published in The Creative Process comments on Isserly's appraisal of her human prey, interpreting it as a reversal of Laura Mulvey's theoretical male gaze, and while it certainly is a reversal, I would contend that it is, more accurately, a reversal of the colonial gaze theorised by Rieder, an extension of Mulvey once again, this time turned on the white man.

In fact, since the novel relies on generic classification as a literary novel in addition to science fiction, I would go so far as to say that Under the Skin resembles a classic colonial novel quite closely, had it been told from the perspective of Amliss Vess, the dilettante son of the owner of the corporation that Isserly works for, it might have resembled Heart of Darkness, but since readers are largely privy to Isserly's perspective, the text that resonates loudest is George Orwell's Burmese Days. The parallels are astonishing, like Isserly, lonely on Earth, Orwell's John Flory is a solitary teak merchant posted at the remote fictional town of Kyauktada in Burma, part of British India; like Isserly, Flory is disfigured by a birthmark on his face which he spends a very long time bemoaning, and he sets himself apart from the handful of whites who live in town owing to his 'Bolshie' anti-colonial opinions (which come off more patronising than solidary, in my opinion). As with Isserly whose life is momentarily sparked out of its tedium by the arrival of Amliss Vess, Flory briefly sees hope of companionship when Elizabeth Lackersteen arrives from Paris, and finally, both novels end with the protagonists, Isserly and John Flory committing suicide. The chief divergence is that Isserly, by dint of her gender is also exposed to potential violence from the men she hunts, but only marginally. Regardless, both novels attempt to humanise the coloniser. This is far more noticeable in Burmese Days because Orwell was writing while the British Empire was still extant, and it reflected his (weak) criticism of the colonials project while it was on its last legs, but the whole affair is shot through with sympathy for the so-called good egg, still a coloniser, but appropriately reflexive of his position, and I believe that is why Flory has to die at the end of the novel, there is very little room for objections to colonialism when one is directly complicit in it.

By comparison, Isserly is far more sympathetic, she isn't a vodsel sympathiser by any means (though she is in the position that puts her in closest proximity to it, and indeed, at moments she does approach the position, but not quite), she's in it for herself, to escape hard labour and enjoy what is left of her life on a beautiful planet. Isserly's death is precipitated by an accident at the moment where she actually attempts to help a man reach the hospital where his wife is giving birth, the instance of her humanisation coincides with her death — the coloniser is not to be counted among humanity, no matter how human they may appear to be. This is a contrivance of the coloniser himself, at this moment in history, the nations of the imperial core are attempting to banish colonialism into history, a temporary embarrassment of past ages, now rectified, in order to conceal its ravages, its continued existence (Martinique, Guam, Puerto Rico, Palestine and Kashmir come to mind), and how the legacy of colonialism still organises the world even in territories deemed 'post-colonies'. But while I can confidently claim that Orwell was aware of his literary intentions on the subject of colonialism, I cannot say the same for Michel Faber, the genre of science fiction is already saturated by themes of alien invasions, the origins of that thematisation have been lost to time (the hazy days of the 20th century), and Faber does seem more occupied with whether a woman getting plastic surgery is an agential act on her part, the intrinsic beauty of nature, and the case for vegetarianism. Despite this, the history of the novel's theming shines through for those who go looking, deepening its literary substance, though perhaps not in the way the author might have intended.

Oh, and I should mention, I think I actually enjoyed the novel?

Under the Skin reviews I read:

1. Keeping up with the Penguins

2. Blot

3. Kirkus Reviews

4. Amanja Reads Too Much

5. Book Reporter

6. The Creative Process

7. Articulated (I did not enjoy this review)

8. The Arched Doorway

9. Independent Review of Books

10. Various reviews on GoodReads and Storygraph