Under The Skin

Isserley Bothers

Under The Skin
by Michel Faber
CanonGate Books Ltd
ISBN: 978-1782112112

Warning: Spoilers which could get under your skin if you let them.

Last year, when I reviewed the brilliant movie Under The Skin (read that one here) I stated that, after puzzling about certain aspects of the narrative in the movie, I wished I had actually read the novel by Michel Faber before going into that experience. Now, having read the novel, I can only echo that sentiment because, frankly, despite being a world apart from the very loose movie adaptation, there’s more of a problem, I feel, going from the movie to the novel than there possibly is the other way around.

Under The Skin is a beautiful movie and it’s a great book too. It joins, to my mind, some of the other great movie pseudo adaptations of the past that have been successful in their own right while being almost mutually exclusive from the subject material in the way in which the artists involved chose to change things. The other two I’m specifically thinking of right now are the Lynne Ramsey movie of Alan Warner’s Morvern Callar and Peter Webber’s version of Tracy Chevalier’s novel Girl With A Pearl Earring (the latter also starred Scarlett Johansson as the main protagonist in the movie version, as does the filmed version of Under The Skin). Both Morvern Callar and Girl With A Pearl Earring were more successful, in some ways, in their adapted versions because in the film versions they both stripped down the content to something less dramatically ostentatious, choosing to leave out what some directors might see as specifically cinematic elements of their stories and instead  present their drama’s in an understated manner which, honestly, seemed to work out much better for their final product than I imagine it would have done if the writers and directors of the filmed versions had aimed their end product closer to the original works.

The movie version of Under The Skin also chooses to leave bits out and takes as many liberties, it seems to me, as it can get away with. In the movie version, Scarlett Johansson’s nameless protagonist picks men up in cars where she then traps them into a clearly sinister and deadly fate. We see she has an on-screen helper who is called when needed and we can see, by the end of the film, that she is alien to this planet. A humanoid wearing a “human suit” who comes to a particularly sticky fate. The same character in the book also comes to a sticky ending to her daily routine but things transpire in a much different manner and the attitudes of the character by the end are unchanged, in practice, to the person she has been all along... whereas in the film the pangs of sympathy she holds for the humans she has been... well... harvesting, take over and lead her along a different path.

In the book, she is called Isserley and she and her fellow aliens are, to them, the human beings. They all live together in a farm complex and Isserley picks up her prey exactly as she does in the movie... but then injects them into unconsciousness, when she is sure she is relatively safe in taking them, before driving them back to the barn for processing, fattening up and then, eventually, shipping them off to her home planet as an expensive delicacy.

She is a strong but sad character because she has chosen this lifestyle to avoid a worse fate on her home world and, because her species is, unlike the ‘vodsels’ (their name for what we would call humans), she has been surgically broken and mutilated from the horse like creature she is. Tail and udders removed, spine and limbs broken to become something like a vodsel form and with a large pair of breasts grafted on to her to attract male vodsels.

The book is pure science fiction but it’s a slow burn and thus my reason for saying that I’d have preferred not to have seen the film first. With the film, from trailers and marketing, you already know Scarlet is playing an alien predator. In the books, Michel Faber peels back the layers gradually so it takes you maybe a third of the way into the book before you have all the necessary information to put that premise together for yourself. Each time Isserley picks up a vodsel she questions him to find out if it’s a good risk to inject him with the mechanism built into the passenger seat of her modified car and, though not told in first person, the whole book is told from Isserley’s viewpoint only... other than a series of brief sections ranging from a couple of pages to, in one case, a single line, which tells you what is going through the vodsel’s mind when he is in conversation with Isserley. The pattern is repeated and gets a rhythm in the mind of the reader so that the lack of information with some of the potential victims can be used for dramatic intent... which is nice.

Like some of the best science fiction, Isserley’s viewpoint, which dictates the shape of the novel, comes from a place where we are slowly spoonfed the various contents of her ‘otherness’ in such a way that we can view her as something separate from a standard human being... or should I say separate her from a vodsel, to use her language. Faber really pushes the point home in a paragraph about halfway through the novel when Isserley is reflecting on the true intellect of the vodsels and how they are in any way different from the intelligence associated with her race... basically anything on our planet which doesn’t walk on all fours is seen by her people as a dumb animal which can be happily harvested for food. Faber uses sentences like this to show her viewpoint here...

“They couldn’t siuwill, they couldn’t mesnishti, 
they had no concept of slan.”

Faber deliberately makes use of nonsense words to help the vodsels who are reading his book identify with the victims and, through the readers confusion at this point, help establish the true alien nature of the central character. Okay, this tactic is a little clumsy in some ways because he only goes this extreme with the concept once in the book, for about a paragraph, unless I missed something... but it does get the point home when he needs to emphasise the attitudes of Isserley and her colleagues, who are included in the story as major characters also... unlike in the film where they are humanoid in form and almost, but not quite, non-existent in the visual presentation on screen. This, of course, places us in a position where we can understand the main theme Faber seems to be pushing, which would be a firm position on a vegetarian lifestyle in opposition to the slaughter of another species for food. Now I’m definitely a carnivore, for my sins, but I can appreciate the sentiment and argument and it seems to be the main treatise and underlying point of the novel. I guess it’s probably a very effective one if you’re already having thoughts about going in that general direction.

Under The Skin is, for the most part, a well written piece of literature which is miles apart from the movie version but, having seen the movie first and finding it an effective piece of cinematic art, I can’t honestly say either one detracts too much from enjoyment of the other. Certainly, if you have seen the film and want to explore, lets call it an alternative viewpoint, of the motivations of the main character, then you will probably get a rewarding experience from the book. Isserley is a much different person but she is not as hardened as her ultimate actions would make her appear and, like the movie version of the character to a certain extent (which is quite subtle and which you need to work at to piece together... and that’s as valid a way to present a movie as any other), she is a fully fleshed out and rounded individual with a lot of thought gone into her... probably much more so than the version of her written for Scarlett Johansson’s portrayal, now I reflect on it. Not an important work of science fiction, to be sure, but certainly an entertaining and, sometimes, thought provoking one which I would say is definitely worth picking up. Perhaps not a major work but certainly an enjoyable one.

For a review of Michel Faber’s book The Crimson Petal and The White, written by guest reviewer Sandy Hamilton, please take a look here... http://nuts4r2.blogspot.co.uk/2012/06/crimson-petal-and-white.html

Under The Skin

Skin And Bare It

Under The Skin
2014 UK
Directed by Jonathan Glazer
Playing at UK cinemas now.

Under The Skin is one of those films that exists in a certain space in cinema which allows you to bring your own baggage with you and create your own interpretations of what is going on within the material as it’s presented to you, to a certain degree. Films like this have a special, almost “Holy” place in cinema and they also tend to divide audiences quite heavily... at least that's what I usually observe. I saw two new cinema releases this weekend and both of these films had this kind of interpretive quality to them. However, the other one I saw failed in its intent spectacularly, in my opinion, because the message which I brought to/took from it seemed to be way less than the sum of its parts and the frames were, typically for the director of this other movie, crowded with ideas and details but... it all just felt like a lot of chaos for very little reward or insight at the end of it. I’ll get to all that in my review of that film when I write it. Check back here in a day or two for that one.

As far as Under The Skin goes, I think the qualities I just highlighted worked so well because the action of the characters and the space in which the actors performed them was, mostly, calm and tranquil, allowing the experience to very slowly let you explore what you think you are seeing in the movie. So much so, in fact, that some of the key sequences were deliberately uncluttered in what I personally believe were the language of metaphor rather than actual reality... although the film's director did have a tendency to keep upending my deductions of such matters as I was watching and, in one quite spectacular sequence, where a man’s internal organs, muscles and bones are very quickly extracted from his body, leaving only his skin floating around, I was forced to even question the nature of those similar scenes I had been viewing.

The always watchable Scarlett Johansson plays an alien creature who “wears” the skin of other people and uses this as a disguise, drifting from peron to person and place to place as a, for want of a better term, predator. She is not necessarily a sexual predator (I haven’t read the original novel on which this was based and, having seen this, now wish I had before I saw the movie, actually) but she uses the language, both minimally verbal and physically, of human sexuality to pick up her prey. She then devours them in a what I can only assume, in spite of a couple of sequences bordering on the cheerful art of the non sequitur for me, is a metaphor for the storage and consumption of human beings (represented by a black room with somebody undressing and following the disrobing Johansson, then slowly sinking step by step into a bizarre and dreamlike liquid storage state, before being eaten later).

The film, I am glad to say, was very minimal in dialogue throughout, which I prefer as I still tend to see cinema as a visually dominant form of art (although, bearing in mind my love of scoring, I really shouldn’t still feel this way). To ignore the music and sound design of this film, however, which at times become almost interchangeable as an ambient noise, probably created purely by the composer,  slowly creeps into the realm of sinister and unsettling music... would be a big mistake. While not technically atonal, the score still has the kind of power to both make you feel less at ease in places... it’s always pushed to the front of the sound mix in the “eating” sequences... and to tell you what’s coming next with an almost leitmotif style running through it, even though thematically it seems almost as alien as this film’s central character.

Starting off with Johansson discovering and practicing human vocalisations, which make important the world of sound to a certain extent, the character of the alien takes on a journey through the film where, if read one way, “she” becomes more humanistic as she is, perhaps, polluted by the sometimes troubled souls with whom she comes into contact. The director cannily punctuates the long stretches of calm, stealth and exploration which characterises the majority of the movie, with occasional stabs of sound and sometimes action which shock by their highlights in isolation, the way that somebody like Tarkovsky or Bergman may have chosen to highlight something within the overall consuming style of one of their works, perhaps. A sudden lively burst of conversation, a violent mob or a hardcore, aggressively lit dance club are all thrown into the mix as the main protagonist/antagonist, depending on how much you can identify with her, goes about her daily/nightly business. The visceral shock of these moments, which hit you like a muffled, comfortably wrapped, crash to your senses amidst a barren, meandering journey allows you, the audience, as a human spectator, to empathise with the way the character is able to handle these sudden changes in tempo and, if you’re like me, come closer to her viewpoint. Which I’m guessing was the director’s plan?

The film is adult in nature, at least in terms of there being tonnes of nudity and allusions to sexuality, but lit quite muddily in places... which lifts what could have been a gaudy, exploitative entertainment (and there’s nothing wrong with that) into something much more restrained and expressive of the kind of existence depicted here. Interestingly, because of the underlying nature of the creature’s easy target of human sexuality, and the kinds of people “she” has to plunder to sustain her on this planet (although there’s no real indication she is of extra-terrestrial origin, to be honest), the irony is that we learn as much, probably more, about the nature of the human condition from Johansson’s journey through it, than we do of the origin of her species and her purpose here other than just existing and eating. Again, I may or may not get more of that equation from the novel. And, of course, the irony is that she, too, seems to be growing to a new relationship with her encounters with humanity... and her final fate, which I certainly won’t reveal here, is a symptom of the naivety of not approaching such a changeable and unpredictable species such as humanity without a certain amount of caution and distrust.

Under The Skin is, I have to say, a film which I couldn’t fully comprehend on my first viewing, mainly due to the fact that I was trying to apply a certain logic to the visual metaphor and its final conclusions with certain characters. For example, the lack of the central character’s blindness to the condition of another character she encounters, said everything about her alien outlook but the final fate of this character seemed at odds with what I’d seen before, unless you see Johansson’s slow descent as one of empathy rather than consumption of something that didn’t agree with her digestive system (as I was initially taking this for as I watched).

I went into the cinema thinking that this would be a kind of female-centric version of Nicholas Roeg’s movie adaptation The Man Who Fell To Earth (reviewed here) and, although the films are as different as chalk and cheese, the otherworldliness of the central characters and the way they are depicted without any judgements made by the roving “camera eye” is certainly something which the two films have in common. Under The Skin would certainly go well as the second part of a double feature with Roeg’s classic, for sure.

At times inscrutable, at times simplistic but always emotionally engaging, Under The Skin is probably one of the better films you’ll see in a cinema environment this year... so if you are a lover of the art form of film then it would probably not be something you’d consider missing. Certainly, in my case, it’ll probably lead to harder things... like multiple viewings and reading the original novel by Michel Faber. So catch this one if you can.

The Crimson Petal and The White

Allow me to introduce my guest blogger
Sandy Hamilton, returning to this blog after
too long an absence with a real humdinger
of a book review.

Studies of Sugar from the novel, drawn by Sandy Hamilton.


Tickle Me Pink


The Crimson Petal and The White
Michel Faber
Canongate Books 
ISBN: 1847678939

Thank you once again, Nuts4r2, for inviting me onto your blog. I appreciate the opportunity to share my thoughts and feelings about ‘The Crimson Petal and The White’ by Michel Faber.
I came to this novel late, after having watched and enjoyed the television adaptation. Already noted as “The International Bestseller” on the front cover, it came with a bold number of glowing reviews and accolades, spanning five pages no less, within it’s own covers. Likened to Dickens, Byatt, Fowles and Bronte, amongst other canonic giants, it boasted a tip-top pedigree and assured that it would not disappoint. Ever the cynic, I felt fearful of a fall in the face of such confidence but also a little excited, just in case it lived up to its promise.

Although I would love to be different from the crowd by railing against the simpering sycophantic majority and, in my ever so ‘umble opinion, pointing out the error of their ways, I absolutely couldn’t. This book left me wiping the dribble from my chin as my mouth fell open in soppy awe. Apparently, you can judge a book by its cover!

I found The Crimson Petal And The White intriguing right from the first words as the ‘entre nous’ narrative voice speaks directly to the reader with a warning to “watch your step”. I felt that I had been noticed entering this world and my naïve expectations of floating along on a cloud of social niceties were immediately challenged. If I stayed, I felt I was going to be confronted with some unpalatable truths as I would be spending time in a dark and “bitterly cold” place where I would be “led astray”. A hook if I ever saw one, as who doesn’t want to gawp at something we shouldn’t be looking at?

And then, subtly, almost out of awareness, sexual language started priming me for the intimacy to come. It potently saw into my secret hope of having desires satisfied that I was “too shy to name”; it told of my “spent breath”, where the air could be “frigid”.

So with this ‘entrance’, what, exactly, was I to encounter?

As it turns out, a wonderful novel, brilliantly written, about how the political impacts the personal and how the individual fares in social structures created by the few. Faber draws a broad political and social landscape of oppression, sexism, health and mental wellbeing, the warmth and cold of relationships, the reaching or not of potential, the way we enter into the world of the other as rescuer, persecutor or victim – and publishing. He asks the reader to think about great themes, such as the damage caused to all parties by the pressures of social norms, or the impact on those without power of a society without any health or education systems. More subtly, it shows how even those who seemingly hold the power, don’t fare too well unless they know how to survive in their own milieu. Although it lays out serious ideas, the dark journey is lifted by a humour and lightness of touch in the writing that prevents it from sinking into the doldrums.

Faber delicately reveals the psychological and emotional impact of the environment and relationships on individuals and shows how we’re all intertwined. This is all played out when two apparently opposite worlds come together in the relationship between the main protagonists; Sugar, an intelligent prostitute representing the repressed poor and William Rackham, a foolish fop, representing the upper classes. Even as we judge each other, we nonetheless need each other and, like William and Sugar, each can be helped to a fuller potential by the other.

We are first led, by the narrator, to a location “on the wrong side”, a place that we’d rather not see, to which most turn a blind eye, lest they experience unbearable feelings. Faber enables us to stay, look and learn by cradling us in the security blanket of his divine language, which keeps us on the right side of despair. We later see there is no difference between the needs and wants of both sets of people, just in their ‘gets’, which is mostly governed by attitude. Women who have ‘fallen’ from society (as if there’s a place from which to topple), are looked down on from on high, yet men who have “fallen” in the war are looked up to from down low.

As the characters push out from polite society, we can get real, get dirty, just grow up and realize that the inner world of people can be dark and cold, very deep and surprising. This book asks us to delve deeper into the secret, often hidden parts of ourselves required for deeper intimacy that ultimately give us, for better or worse, a more satisfying human connection. It also reminds us that the best art can fulfill this for us, as it touches and awakens parts of ourselves that long for a sublime connection.

Faber does this with his ingenuous methods of revealing the psychological makeup of characters. We hear the cruel, derogatory, internalised parental voice of Mrs Castaway intruding into Sugar’s thoughts, for example, with her ‘oh don’t snivel’ at a time when she is in enormous pain (there was no gynaecological treatment available). A more humorous symbol of the characters’ emotional and mental health is the state of their hair. Sugar’s unmistakable golden-orange hair has a life of it’s own, and William is comically introduced by his hair which, released from under his hat, is jumping around on his head “a flip-flopping crest … like a small furry animal fallen out of the sky onto the head of a man, and determined to keep its purchase there no matter what.” William’s hair is cut shorter and shorter throughout the book as his lot becomes more serious.

Faber gets busy in this book challenging assumptions. We expect that the ‘dark and bitterly cold’ landscape is that of the poor, but actually there is comfort and support in the relationships formed between some of the characters here that does not exist within those in seemingly warmer situations. A warmth that Sugar starts to lose as she moves out of her own, into a new world.

So what makes a cold environment? Not the lack of heating that Emmeline Fox experiences as she lives alone in her house. In fact Mrs Fox is the real sexy vixen of the novel. She’s all woman and, like the cocoa she drinks which “probably” has a “secret ingredient”, underneath her straight-laced piety she’s oozing with sexual tension.

On the subject of sex, Faber does not collude with the pretence that we are coy and unaware. He both faces us at times with the raunchy truth and at others, allows us to be carried away on an ethereal higher plane as his explicit language and descriptions of sex between a prostitute and her customer are contrasted with the devoted, sensual but (almost) unconsummated relationship, between Emmeline and Henry. In our sexually repressed society, this book offers the opportunity to have an adult relationship with sex. I am no prude and found it a relief to discover that I had entered into a world where sexual behaviour, usually coyly termed as “adult” content, is treated in a grown-up way. It’s worrying to me that this subject still elicits sniggers (even on training courses for psychotherapists) and according to one of the reviews on the cover by a contemporary magazine, young women readers need “smelling salts at the ready, girls.” Do they? Why? Why can’t we accept it as the natural organismic (that’s organismic!) aspect of being human?

I found it lovely to see a male depiction of women written with such sensitivity and understanding. I really felt the frustration that Faber shows when female potential can only be reached through a man: his success is her success, his money is her money. If ever there was a challenge to the unthinking view that ‘men don’t understand women’ then look no further than the world of literature where women have been beautifully portrayed by male authors throughout the years. Unfortunately, this in itself tells the bigger story of a lack of women authors, especially in the literary canon. Men are still not being drawn to reading books written by women, and I wonder whether this is an internalised sexism whereby women themselves believe the message of ‘not good enough’. As I write, there is a news headline “women still not in the top jobs”, and, as a woman, I ask, who is really stopping us?

And talking of sensitivity, I must add that Faber constructs stunning sentences, including, I believe, the most perfect sentence I’ve ever read. Just as William hides behind a pseudonym when he secretly visits Sugar, she hides behind a monument commemorating the fallen in the Crimean War when she secretly visits him. Faber brilliantly encapsulates so much within the sentence: “She peeps from behind the plinth, her cheek brushing against the names of young men who are no longer alive, subtle absences in the smoothness of the marble”.

So I leave this review, not with my ‘ever so ‘umble opinion’ but humbled in the presence of such a masterful author who truly has the gift of enhancing the life of his readers. Thank you Michel, if I may, for a poignant and touching encounter. It most certainly lived up to the promise and I’ve had a very exciting ride with you ;-).

Follow Sandy Hamilton on Twitter here.