Humans with alien masks
And vice versa, in Michel Faber's Under the Skin
This week is a look into Michel Faber’s novel Under the Skin, with spoilers. Thing is, this is a book that does a great job of teasing out the reveals, so if the synopsis in the link sounds interesting to you, I recommend reading it and coming back here later. (I’ll warn that the book does get graphic with its body horror. However, the body horror is striking, not to mention integral to the story.)
The first page begins in the middle of things, following a normal day for our protagonist.
Isserley picks up hitchhikers, and many things about this are strange: her precision of method, her singular focus on the task, and her choice of target. She is looking for large men, which, given she is a woman driving alone on rural roads, is more surprising still. In the next few pages we find that she is also an overly cautious driver, constantly afraid of an accident, and when she picks up a hitchhiker, she is awkward and yet calculating in her conversation, as if investigating her passenger. Faber unfolds this strangeness, which as with every good beginning, is also a question. Or to put it another way: the reader is always collecting clues, guessing ahead to what might happen next. For example, how Isserley thinks of a good “specimen” of a man as “a hunk on legs.” The first read of these words are sexual, objectifying. Is she trying to pick up a date? By page 22 (just about the end of the first chapter) we understand, as she flips a switch that injects the hitchhiker with a sedative, that she is after something else.
This is Collected Fictions.
I came across this Octavia Butler quote in Karla Holloway’s tweet:
I remember my thought was: of course. Octavia Butler seeks aliens that are truly alien; of course it is a failure of our imagination when the aliens simply want to murder or colonize us for riches. I love in Butler’s work when an alien arrives with needs and desires that are strange, complicated, and even incomprehensible; that aliens can be so different in appearance that the humans encountering them must train themselves to swallow their panic and disgust in order to even look at their bodies. Butler’s aliens ask us to unlearn what we know. There is a moral ambiguity to her aliens, and to the people who are seduced by and suppressed by them, that resists summary. When others read allegory into her work, she disavowed it. Allegory flattens with such ease.
Isserley happens to be an alien with a human mask on. But she cannot remove her mask. She has undergone extreme surgeries to appear human, which has left her disabled, disfigured1, and with chronic pain.2 (In this she is othered not only from humans, but also from her own species. It offers her a unique position, with some knowledge of both worlds; often the best vantage is from the margins.)
We also gradually come to understand that Isserley kidnaps human men for her job, and that the men will be processed into food. “Hunks,” we finally realize, refers to hunks of meat. They are dangerous cattle, not really sentient; to her, “humans” are those of her species, whereas men are “vodsels,“ uncultured and violent by nature. Over the course of the novel, we watch Isserley pick up man after man and subject them to a gruesome fate, which on its own is a premise I would probably find exhausting—as, it turns out, Isserley finds her work to be. Tension grows—will her opinion about her quarry change? will she quit and run away? will one of the hitchhikers escape? figure her out? hurt her?—and these lines of tension are important to the page-flip quality of the book. However, I don’t particularly think these tensions are what make the novel a great one.
Under the Skin alternates between two POVs: a close-third on Isserley, and on the mind of whoever is in her passenger seat.3 Each time she picks up a hitchhiker, the perspective volleys, heightening the tension, playing on the gender inversion of the situation, and on the fact that Isserley (although hunting these men) can no longer run due to her surgeries and has no help to call on when she is threatened. She has no superhuman strength, and in fact, many of her senses have been dulled in order to obscure her alien features. In each scene, we alternate between rooting for or fearing the man in her car, the story drawing on or dashing our sympathies. We lean in, hoping, scared.
The mystery of what will happen next stretches out the uncanny feeling that our allegiances are no longer clear, so that we must inhabit the discomfort of ambiguity. Ambiguity is not vagueness. Vagueness is where the reader’s belief dies. Ambiguity is either/or. The mystery resides there, between the reader and the text, in the mystery of what we would do in Isserley’s driver’s seat, in how we feel when we are thrust back into the (now estranged) human perspective. Or as Flannery O’Connor wrote: “mystery isn’t something that is gradually evaporating. It grows along with knowledge.”
The back and forth also shows what POV is: a blinkered, biased version of the world. Isserley, the men—they know so little of each other’s lives. The world punishes mistakes of ignorance. Worldbuilding is not just about how many details you can stick into a story, something many writers who are just starting out get wrong; what convinces the reader is the world’s resistance to the characters. How cause creates effect. The characters convince by resisting in turn.
The question Butler’s quote raises is, if an alien is convincingly alien, how does a human (or vodsel) reader relate to them? Can we extend across that distance between species, from one mind to another—can we bridge the great divide that spans two seats in a car? Under the Skin traces and retraces this attempt from each side, which in repetition, becomes tragic. What’s more, while Isserley does terrible things, when the consequences of cause and effect find her, and I see her react in a strikingly—do I say “human”?—way, influencing her actions, striking down her desires, I grieve for her.
Isserley often mourns her alien features which have been altered and amputated, such as her lost fingers, tail, and especially her hair, which once covered her body like a pelt. Of course, these changes make her appear closer to our conventional ideas of attractiveness (see the following note), emphasizing the dissonance there. Meanwhile the male victims are, in graphic depictions, “processed”—their tongues removed, castrated (she uses the animal/husbandry term, “gelded”—note the sexual significance), and force-fed until they cannot stand on two legs. Thus Isserley and her victims are both, in their minds, “dehumanized.”
She is also augmented with large breasts to attract her male prey: our gender/sexual norms reflected back to us. Indeed we learn that although the aliens are different in many ways, sexism is universal (pun intended).
I would say “of her victims” but in fact that’s inaccurate. Once and for a single sentence, the POV shifts to another alien who sits in the passenger seat. I doubt many readers notice this, although as with the other POV shifts it is marked by a white space break. I think it’s an alluring thought: a POV located not in people but in place, in a thing. An object that accrues omniscient powers.
I love Faber’s writing. This is a great analysis of the text. Found the film version of this story extremely moving as well—it has stuck with me in a way that movies don't always.