- guardian.co.uk, Sunday 20 February 2000 01.00 GMT
Under The Skin
Michel Faber
Canongate £9.99, pp296
Buy it at BOL
Every morning, a woman named Isserley sets off on the A9 in Rosshire to look for hitchhikers. Although she's lived in a cottage near the Moray Firth for the past four years, the beauty of the Scottish Highlands and its vast, seemingly limitless, skies can still take her by surprise. A feature of the landscape, a natural phenomenon - farmhouses in the distance turning golden in the rising sun, or a low mist, 'pure water floating through the air like smoke' - can suddenly transfix her.
Otherwise she is wholly, almost agonisingly intent on her search. When she spots a male hitchhiker - she's only interested in men - she drives by them at least twice, to check they're healthy and well-built. If they are, she picks them up.
Each of the scenes in Isserley's car is a brilliantly compressed drama of threat and ambiguity, in which you're never quite sure who is the predator and who the prey. The heating is always on full, because it's winter but also because it allows Isserley to wear tops which show a lot of cleavage. She stares straight ahead, her hair covering her face, and tries to draw her passengers into conversation.
With characteristic irony, the reader, meanwhile, finds out immediately what's on her passengers' minds. There are other, more alien, sources of menace: odd words of an unfamiliar language keep intruding into the narrative, Isserley's car is customised in some specific way, her palpable discomfort - her troubled breathing, the way she grips the steering wheel with her scarred hands - seem to be more than merely psychological.
Eventually, the tension resolves itself in one of two ways: The lift ends, or Isserley goes home to rest or sets off on the road again. Michael Faber has a considerable gift for creating suspense and it is no hardship respecting this by not saying in a review what Isserley is up to and why.
The answer, for a start, is far stranger and more unexpected than most people would guess. It is revealed and developed in such a way as to draw the reader into the novel's imagined world. And, above all, Faber's ambition is significantly higher than simply to write a nightmarish thriller or other genre work. As he showed in his collection of short stories, Some Rain Must Fall, his preoccupations are dislocation and displacement - often extreme - and the mechanics of how, by allowing characters' psychologies to unfold according to a rigorous and, if necessary, cruel logic, these states can raise questions about their opposites: 'settled' states of mind, social practises and lives.
With Isserley, he has reversed the usual direction of metamorphosis in literature - from human into other life forms - given it a modern, surgical twist and so allowed himself to call man's place on Earth strikingly into question. For Isserley, for instance, 'What went on inside the houses... was insignificant; the dwellings and inhabitants were like tiny shells and shrimps nestling on the seabed under an ocean of pale blue oxygen. Nothing that happened on the ground could ever compete with the grandeur of what happened above.'
As a whole, the novel propels its central metaphor to a single conclusion: that the only thing dictating whether what lies 'under the skin' is flesh or meat is perspective. And so can we justifiably claim that mercy is a distinctively human, or even existing, virtue? Recalling writers such as Jim Crace and Russell Hoban, Under the Skin, like Faber's short stories, is an extremely assured and imaginative work. It'll get to you, one way or another. Of that there is no doubt.
