Thanks to Jeff and Fuggo
and especially to my wife Eva,
for bringing me back to earth
Contents
Title Page Dedication Chapter One Chapter Two Chapter Three Chapter Four Chapter Five Chapter Six Chapter Seven Chapter Eight Chapter Nine Chapter Ten Chapter Eleven Chapter Twelve Chapter Thirteen About the Author Copyright
Introduction by David Mitchell
To write a preface to Under the Skin is an honour which brings with it a thorny challenge: how to whet the reader’s appetite without trampling over what is, to my mind, one of the best-orchestrated reveals in modern British fiction? The truth about Ablach Farm, what a vodsel is and why a woman called Isserley drives around the Scottish Highlands searching for male hitch-hikers is revealed over the first third of the book via half-dropped hints, and postponed by jumped-to conclusions: Isserley’s a nymphomaniac – no, she’s a serial-killer – no, my God, she’s some sort of . . . The zigzagging flirtation ends on a wintry night of torchlit ghastliness which delivers a premise as audacious as it is grim.
Only a masterly writer could handle the background scenario of Under the Skin without it smelling of schlock; but Michel Faber is a masterly writer and he constructs Ablach Farm’s system of production with fiendish success. How? By addressing the louder objections to his premise, but letting the pickier ones go, and by seducing the reader with his pitch-perfect language (‘the utterly distinctive sound of cluntering hoofs and the heavy ploff of faeces’); his oddball humour (‘“Bjork, Pulp, Portishead . . .” These last three names sounded to Isserley like varieties of animal feed’); his snapshots of Highland lives, its landscapes and its dialect; and the life-or-death tosses of the coin whenever a hitch-hiker climbs into Isserley’s red Toyota. By these means, Faber obtains (or pickpockets?) his readers’ consent that, Yes, just maybe, the existence of a vodsel farm in the wilds somewhere north of Inverness might not be altogether impossible . . . And then he’s got you.
An audacious premise makes a fine appetiser, but it isn’t the main course. The principal plot is ushered in by the arrival of the farm-owner’s son, the louche Amlis Vess. The (dangerous) compassion Vess shows the livestock, and his failure to live up to Isserley’s prejudices against him, oblige her to question her values and aspirations. This soul-searching hastens her slow-motion burn-out and makes the final sentence of the novel well-nigh inevitable.
Isserley’s past in the ‘New Estates’ is glimpsed – murkily – and her victimhood enlists the reader’s sympathies, even after we have learned what she has to do to earn her living. More so than Faber’s most famous heroine, the Victorian prostitute Sugar of Silver Street (from his majestic The Crimson Petal and the White), Isserley is straitjacketed by cruelty, isolation, severe pain and ‘a cage of her own bone and muscle’. Her (and by extension, Faber’s) observations about human and British society, our habits, demerits, television – our anthropology – are fresh and canny, and invite us to see ourselves through her unique foreign eyes.
Despite Isserley’s extreme otherness, however, her life is susceptible to a drudgery and injustice that many of us would recognize. She, too, suffers from a fickle corporate employer who ups her quota without warning; she, too, has been discarded by rich males; she, too, must endure sexism from workplace low-lives, and even gets snapped at by a semi-deranged canteen chef (who bears a disarming similarity to more than one chef I have known). How could Isserley and her co-workers possibly be fictitious when their lives so closely resemble our own?
Praise of a novel’s satirical qualities can indicate a weak narrative pulse. Not here: Under the Skin is a full-throttle read, but one which swarms with wit, meaning and ironies, which nag at the reader long after the book is finished. Some ironies are smuggled inside innocuous phrases: a hitcher tells Isserley, ‘Bradford was years ago . . . She could’ve moved to fuckin’ Mars by now, for all I know’ ; or the shell-fish wholesaler who warns his Good Samaritan to ‘keep the bag [of whelks ] closed, or they’ll crawl out and hide under your bed’. Other ironies are ironies of fact: it was Isserley’s beauty which qualified her for her assignment, an assignment which required her to be irreversibly disfigured; and the more that Isserley’s indifference to the vodsels is eroded, the more ‘human’ she becomes – and the less likely to work her way towards a happy ending.
Indeed, to reread Under the Skin is to succumb to a sort of literary psychosis where you start seeing deeper meanings lurking in every other sentence: one could even assemble them into feasible arguments that Under the Skin is a satire on the food chain or an allegory on cultural relativism. The darkest-dyed irony for me, however, is that to damn Isserley and the Vess Corporation is to damn ourselves, for reasons of glass-houses and stones – and nor can the mere avoidance of pâté de foie gras get us off the hook. We of the Anthropocene era, too, are guilty of anaesthetising our consciences for the sake of our appetites. We, too, cultivate a myopia towards suffering – local and global and across the animal kingdom – for the sake of a quiet life. Isserley is, after all, a very human heroine. So read all about her, and bon appetit.
ISSERLEY ALWAYS DROVE straight past a hitch-hiker when she first saw him, to give herself time to size him up. She was looking for big muscles: a hunk on legs. Puny, scrawny specimens were no use to her.
At first glance, though, it could be surprisingly difficult to tell the difference. You’d think a lone hitcher on a country road would stand out a mile, like a distant monument or a grain silo; you’d think you would be able to appraise him calmly as you drove, undress him and turn him over in your mind well in advance. But Isserley had found it didn’t happen that way.
Driving through the Highlands of Scotland was an absorbing task in itself; there was always more going on than picture postcards allowed. Even in the nacreous hush of a winter dawn, when the mists were still dossed down in the fields on either side, the A9 could not be trusted to stay empty for long. Furry carcasses of unidentifiable forest creatures littered the asphalt, fresh every morning, each of them a frozen moment in time when some living thing had mistaken the road for its natural habitat.
Isserley, too, often ventured out at hours of such prehistoric stillness that her vehicle might have been the first ever. It was as if she had been set down on a world so newly finished that the mountains might still have some shifting to do and the wooded valleys might yet be recast as seas.
Nevertheless, once she’d launched her little car onto the deserted, faintly steaming road,