Under the Skin

As I mentioned in my last blog, I saw the film of Michel Faber’s Under the Skin earlier this year and I loved it.  It’s rare that I get to display the film side of my degree in this blog and I’m happy to take the chance to.  It’s wonderfully dark and it left me wanting to read the book.  It’s very unusual for me to the film first and so it’s a pretty novel feeling.  And I had my doubts about the book.  The is fantastic, but it’s a very visual thing.  There’s little dialogue, sweeping Scottish scenery and some ambiguous bits about men dying horrific deaths.  Also full-frontal male nudity.  In short, there’s a lot in the film that could make for a boring as hell book and I fully expected Anne Radcliffe-esque descriptions of hills in amongst the man killing alien parts. 

What saves the book is the fact that it is nothing like the film.  Normally when that happens (with the exception of the James Whale Frankenstein films) I get a bit livid.  But the fact that they are completely different allows both to be brilliant.  The book is far too high concept for a low budget British film.  The aliens, revealed in their true form in Faber’s book, would have looked ridiculous on the screen- like talking, double jointed lynx.  There is far more plot to the book than the film, which did surprise me.  The book’s narrative tells a story of Isserley, an alien who picks up male hitch hikers and brings them to her colleagues to fatten up before their murder and subsequent shipping out for food.  Isserley is so much more knowable in the book; she has a back story and interacts with characters she doesn’t later murder (or arranged to have killed).  She falls in love. 

As I mentioned earlier, the fate that the aliens’ victims suffer is horrific.  They are castrated.  Their tongues are cut out and they are fattened up all to serve as an extortionately expensive delicacy.  But Faber makes it possible for us to spend so much time in Isserley’s.  She too is so clearly a victim.  She has been mutilated from her original lynx-like body to resemble a woman, all to avoid being condemned to The Estates (little explained, but worse than death).  She is unhappy and alone and in chronic pain.  More so, she is victim of the men that she picks up.  Each one is given a brief internal monologue as they step into Isserley’s car and each one that dies objectifies the hell out of her.  And, while I understand that feminism isn’t actually about cutting the balls off misogynists; it’s a fitting fate.  

Faber also uses language fantastically to make us care about the serial killing aliens.  The aliens refer to themselves as human beings and the men that they kill as vodsels.  This barrier dehumanises the victims enough so that when celebrity lay-about Amlis Vess releases four of the men soon due for slaughter, it is Isserley’s frustration at her wasted work and the risk of them being found that concerns the reader rather than the lives of the men.  It’s simple, but it’s effective.  There is a horror in the film that is reduced in the book because of the steps Faber takes to make Isserley less other-worldly.  Even more simply, in Faber’s book Isserley has a name.

I quite simply love this book/ film combination.  There is so much in the book that would have made the film so much more marketable, and yet I am so happy that they left it out.  The two things work so well separately of each other.  I think the film takes a lot more patience than the book, but it’s incredibly rewarding.  I’m not even going to gripe that we’re meant to believe that Scarlet Johansson is meant to be mutilated in anyway because she is bloody wonderful.  I can’t recommend this book enough.  It took me so much surprise and it’s properly brilliant.  Go and read it.

I’ve now moved on to more sci-fi, this time Robert A Heinlein’s A Stranger in A Strange Land.