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.īased around themes of journey, discovery, boundaries, and territory ii, 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 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. 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. Back at a farm, ‘workers’ abduct the victim into a building. 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. Isserley drives through the Highlands looking for muscular jocks hitchhiking the A9 road (p.1). He wrote to heal, through depression and alienation, and dedicates his book to her, “For bringing me back to Earth.” His first novel, written when he was forty years old, Faber had returned from Australia with his wife Eva, to the Scottish Highlands. A grotesqueand comical allegory announcing the arrival of an exciting talent, rich and assured.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. At once humane and horrifying, Under the Skin takes us on a heart-thumping ride through dangerous territory-our own moral instincts and the boundaries of compassion. Michel Faber's work has been described as a combination of Roald Dahl and Franz Kafka, as Somerset Maugham shacking up with Ian McEwan.

Then, it's only a question of how long she can endure her pain-physical and spiritual-and their conversation. But Isserley isonly interested in whether they have families and whether they have muscles. Her hitchhikers are a mixed bunch of men-trailer trash and travelling postgrads, thugs and philosophers. She is strangely erotic yet somehow grotesque, vulnerable yet threatening. Her breasts are perfect perhaps implants. Her posture is suggestive of some spinal problem. She has a remarkable face and wears the thickest corrective lenses anyone has ever seen. She, herself, is tiny-like a kid peering up over the steering wheel.

Isserley picks up hitchhikers with big muscles.

Michel faber under the skin review