Book Tamers| book reviews

When people around you hear you’re reading a horror novel and that actually you’re captivated by the whole bunch of pages, they immediately request full actual data, the author, the title, they express their fright when it comes to the number of pages, but due to a shiny cover, a perfect drawing, a clever foreword, they easily get curious and they all have the same desire: to read it. Well, according to Michel Faber, they partially become reading vodsels.

But what are vodsels? I will not reveal the subject of the book more than the fourth cover does…and I actually don’t know what’s stopping me. A very young and well-adjusted woman picks up every day one hitchhiker so that the people in her underground world to process him as our meat factories do and to serve him as file to the rich subterranean people. These creatures have a different morphology than ours, they walk on four legs, but they have a fox mouth, long ears, tail and they have discovered a way of transforming one of them, named Isserley, in a vodsel female, that is a hot sexy biped.

The novel includes in its narrative space both places where Isserley looks for her victims, that is Highway 9, and the farm where the latter are fattened and carved. As a matter of fact, I thought that every scary novel should have a dark spot, with barbaric, rude and butcher-like creatures.

The perspective of the book is given from the point of view of the bait woman, of this being who has to pretend she is fragile, breathing sexuality, but who actually can barely wait for the moment when she pushes a button that will paralyze the victim. Isserley is the flower of the underworld, morphologically modified in order to have the vodsels’ appearance, but bearing the nostalgia of the lost organs. Nonetheless, her sexual attractiveness is given by her breasts and her hair, the woman is actually scaring some of the hitchhikers, she has a skin full of scars, and her unearthly eyes are masked with the help of some glasses with very thick lenses. She has a strange appearance, a rare understanding capacity; something weird comes out of her. Most of the hitchhikers think it is sexual desire, but the finest psychologists would have a lot of questions to ask this woman driver.

Now, why have I read this novel? Well, first of all because of a statement on the fourth cover that says it could be considered a new „1984”, respectively the description of a phase our society goes through or will go through. We could thus understand that there is or it is about to exist an underground world that appreciates from a culinary point of view the human meat and that there are evidently drivers that seek for lone hitchhikers in order to transform them in soup and steak.

As for the narrative accomplishments of the book, one can see that the action is represented by a monotonous series of murders on the same recipe, that the human society remains indifferent facing the number of the victims that is increasing considering that Isserley takes care of that every single day. I also take notice of the fact that beyond action, it is about the description of some people, who not being able to predict their future death, tell her about their daily routines, their indecision, misunderstandings, the way society treats them. Isserley waits from each and single hitchhiker the confession that no one will ever be interested in them and once she hears that, she pushes the paralyzing button. Some manage to get away, the popular ones, those who are loved or the physically weak. This diabolic machine is a kind of a psychiatric office where the patients, under the aphrodisiac effect of the enormous breasts of the driver, easily confess, they don’t get she’s pushy, that their ego is spoiled so that they could reveal themselves better.

I should also remind the persuasive techniques– Isserley follows some compulsory stages: finding the passenger’s destination, if he is in a hurry or not to reach a certain destination, if he’s expected by someone, and then she offers her breasts in many provocative positions, to stir the clients and to make them think about their own sexual relationships, the way they get along with their women, and she finds out many of them are divorced, they live alone, they’re misunderstood. Isserley becomes a confessor like the hookers who patiently listen all kinds of melodramatic stories from the men who seek to motivate and eventually to justify themselves that they are in their company. The one that got divorced are stung, the travelers as well, and so does the unemployed, the loners and the isolated. As Isserley says to herself, she has the impression society itself sends her the right victims, the hitchhikers are socially conflicted, inconstant and abusive … Isserley gets the impression she resembles a lion that takes care of the human herd purifying it by exterminating the undesired elements, pushed to the edges of society. It is here an allegory of euthanasia or in another plan a parable of the law of the jungle.

What this novel lacks is ideas, a certain consistency. This kind of things can show up only after the reader’s analysis, which is actually let to see what he wants and in the end he is totally lost because of the ambiguous ending. What is to be a hitchhiker, why some people hang around highways, why are they some kind of fishermen of what the street has to offer, how people who pick up hitchhikers think and why they do it, the relationship between driving and loneliness, these are the real questions here.

Plato and his two worlds can’t be forgotten especially when it comes about novels that suppose the presence of us and them, and beings in Isserley’s world look like those in the allegorical cave of the Greek philosopher. Moreover, I thought that Isserley, even though she has the chance of rejoicing the beauties of this world, which are unbelievable for those of her kind, still hangs on to the same initial habits and misunderstandings. She is from this point of view, a psychically inferior being, only the first in the series of butchers in the vodsels’ world. The one that makes the discrepancy between the two worlds, their fundamental differences and the pettiness of his kind is Amlis Vess, a visitor from the underground Dark Worlds, a very rich being who does not have to carry on the dirty chores of his poor fellow creatures. He admires the beauties of the Upper World, he thinks the sky is amazing, the sea is large, the leaves- a phenomenon that makes him think for hours, and sheep are mistaken for clever creatures. Isserley admires the Lower World, and this motivates her to kill, she is nostalgic about her genetically non-modified body, she likes vodsel meat and she often sees in the people down the road just some delicious hunks, but she also presents the image of the underground world and the superior capacity that her fellow creatures would rejoice.

Unfortunately, Michel Faber doesn’t explain the things that truly define an underground creature and the words he invented are actually barbaric and don’t cover any actual reality.
I found here the same trick as in the SF novels. When they should explain what is warp speed or what are the beauties of the underworld in the future, on Planet XP 223, then there is no magical explanation and the bridge to the psychological part is made. Maybe this is why SF novels or their fantastical tricks were successful only after the emphasis moved from action to psychology and from motivation to introspection.

In the end- I am a little bit confused. Did I like the novel or not? It is a new 1984! I think the verdict on the cover can’t be justified, Michel Faber’s writing is dated, and it belongs to those books that once read they just go away with no regrets. I should however praise the storytelling technique of this British author and especially his capacity of joggling multiple meanings, to maintain the story on the distinct and thin line between sexuality, meanness and knowledge.

Written by: Gabriel