Books | Lorelei By Starlight

This weekend I finished Under the Skin by Michel Faber, and it was another one of those books that I just couldn’t put down! Neither the book nor the movie was anywhere on my radar until recently. So, while waiting for the DVD to release I decided to read Faber’s book.

POSSIBLE SPOILER ALERT: While I think the premise of the movie has been pretty well advertised by now, it is possible that talking about the book might ruin it for those that haven’t read or watched yet.

The protagonist, Isserly, is slowly revealed to be something other than the well endowed human she appears to be. She cruises the A9 in Scotland over and over each day picking up hitchhikers, evaluating them to determine whether they will meet her needs, and then either discarding them safely at their destinations or anesthetizing them and taking them back to the farm where she resides. If the unlucky men – for her victims are always men – are taken to the farm, some very nasty things happen to them. From the start I was hooked by Faber’s writing style. He has a beautiful literary prose that creates an interesting contrast with the dark activities that are the heart of this story, and his writing is especially beautiful when Isserly is admiring nature.

Most distracting of all, though, was not the threat of danger but the allure of beauty. A luminous moat of rainwater, a swarm of gulls following a seeder around a loamy field, a glimpse of rain two or three mountains away, even a lone oystercatcher flying overhead: any of these could make Isserly half forget what she was on the road for. She would be driving along as the sun rose fully, watching distant farmhouses turn golden, when something much nearer to her, drably shaded, would metamorphose suddenly from a tree-branch or a tangle of debris into a fleshy biped with its arm extended.

It quickly becomes clear that Isserly is uncomfortable driving. She drives slowly, cautiously, but is often frightened. Road signs cause her anxiety, and the thick glasses that she wears make it hard for her to see. She is too short to fit comfortably in the seat, and due to the body modifications that she has endured, she is in almost constant pain.

These modifications, though, were absolutely necessary, because Isserly is from an alien race who has come to Earth to harvest humans. This reveal, while it seems big, comes very early in the book, and Faber does an interesting job leading up to this by inserting alien terms (such as “icpathua,” the name of the alien anesthetic that she uses) into what often appear to be a normal passages. However, it soon becomes clear that the real heart of this story is not what the aliens are doing, but the ideas that surround it. Amlis Vess, son of the owner of Vess Enterprises on Isserly’s home planet – Vess Enterprises being a marketer of meat, mind you – comes to visit the operation. Vess is opposed to the introduction of meat into the planet’s food system. Isserly is attracted to him even as she tries to convince herself that she finds him distasteful. Vess represents all that she is not: higher class, beautiful, and privileged. Isserly was forced into this job because otherwise she would have been relegated to what amounted to work camps, her own beauty was stripped away from her as her last chance at survival, and all of this due to her low status in society.

Through the interactions of Vess and Isserly, Faber presents a variety of different dilemmas for consideration, the overarching theme of which is centered on Vess’s question: Aren’t we all the same under the skin? Their conversations and beliefs about what it means to be “human” are further complicated because Isserly’s race refers to themselves as “human beings” while referring to us as “vodsels”. This inversion, along with the overall idea of evaluation and culling for prime vodsels – the mainstay of Isserly’s job – brings up the idea of all of the ways that there are to determine either inclusion or exclusion. For instance, Isserly is careful to keep the fact that the vodsels are able to communicate from Vess, which implies that this could be a deal-breaker for many on her planet, and an act that further blurs the possibility of being able to see the two species as similar. When a captured vodsel spells out the word “mercy” in front of Vess, he asks her what it means.

Isserly considered the message, which was MERCY. It was a word she’d rarely encountered in her reading, and never on television. For an instant she racked her brains for a translation, then realized that, by sheer chance, the word was untranslatable into her own tongue; it was a concept that just didn’t exist.

Isserly’s own near brush with violence forces her into a position where she needs mercy, but unfortunately she is unable to even pronounce the word correctly, having never heard it said in all the years that she has been on Earth. And so the creatures from a merciless planet are unable, unwilling, to show mercy to us here on Earth, which it seems may be a fairly merciless place itself.

The anger and lack of empathy that Isserly displays throughout the book are constantly at odds with the appreciation she has for the beauty of nature and animals. This taken in conjunction with her refusal to empathize with vodsels, or allow them to have any essence of “humanity,” makes her monstrous. However, like many monsters we know, she has a past that has made her this way. We can often understand her reasoning, but it is always lacking what we would call a “humanizing” element. There is an almost narcissistic entrenchment in her own pain and anger, and while we can sympathize with her, we cannot empathize, because that is the emotion that she is missing.

I thoroughly enjoyed this book and have a feeling that it is one that I will be re-reading over the years. The movie should be available on DVD soon, and while I am sure that it cannot capture quite the same ideas as Faber’s book, I am excited to see the way that it has been adapted.

Innocence is Koontz’s most recent book, and I picked it up in the library not too long ago. I will be honest and say that I passed it by several times because the description on the jacket really doesn’t do it justice. However, after finally picking it up I was rewarded with one of those rare experiences of having a book that I just didn’t want to put down, that I thought about during the day, and which I looked forward to being able to sit back down with again at the end of the day.

Addison Goodheart is a monster with a heart of gold. When people see him, they seem to find him so repulsive that they try to kill him. His own mother was not able to stomach him for longer than 8 years, and so he has lived most of his life deep under the ground in New York City, where he was fortunate to be found and rescued by another like himself. One night the beauty to this beast enters his life, but she, too, has some problems – a social phobia so strong that she has lived her life basically as a recluse. Together, these two take on a great evil, and the ending – well, it is a most interesting take on “happily ever after”.

Addison’s character is of a type that Koontz has been experimenting with for awhile. There are similarities between Odd Thomas (from the series of the same name), Christopher Snow (Fear Nothing), and Deucalion (from the Frankenstein series). All of these individuals have the characteristics of victims and those destined to be permanently outcast from society: they see ghosts, they are somehow monstrous, or they have a rare disease. However, they are all also fearless in their pursuit of justice for the innocent; they fight to protect those who are weaker than society. In short, these characters consistently display qualities of empathy.

Koontz’s writing in Innocence hooked me from the beginning:

Having escaped one fire, I expected another. I didn’t view with fright the flames to come. Fire was but light and heat. Throughout our lives, each of us needs warmth and seeks light. I couldn’t dread what I needed and sought. For me, being set afire was merely the expectation of an inevitable conclusion. This fair world, compounded of uncountable beauties and enchantments and graces, inspired in me one abiding fear, which was that I might live in it too long.

There is a graceful contrast in this book between the brutalities and beauties of life. That the grotesque can somehow become beautiful is the theme that we all remember from the fairy tale “Beauty and the Beast”. But in Koontz’s hands, this tale is both modernized and inverted. Both of these characters are beasts, but they are also beautiful. There is a reverence of life that plays throughout this story, a deep sensation of what has been taken from us all by society:

Disobedience brought time into the world, so that lives could thereafter be measured to an end. Then Cain murdered Abel, and there was yet another new thing in the world, the power to control others by threat and menace, the power to cut short their stories and rule by fear, whereupon death that was a grace and a welcoming into life without tears became no longer sacred in itself, but became the blunt weapon of crude men.

The way of peace and empathy is rewarded in this book, just as it is in many of Koontz’s other works, including those of Odd Thomas; however, it is a reward that is bittersweet. There is something about these characters that Koontz writes, though, that always makes me want to be that better person, that outsider who conquers the sense of inadequacy thrust by society upon those that don’t quite fit. These characters show that the struggle does not have to be futile, and that there is a path – no matter how narrow – for the outsider who lives the better life. I really liked this book and am looking forward to more dark stories like these from Koontz with these types of redeeming characters.