"Murky Mercy": Michel Faber's Under the Skin and the Difficulty of Reality

This article explores the complex perspectival play underlying readers' engagement with Isserley, the alien protagonist of Michel Faber's 2000 novel Under the Skin. I focus on three dimensions: first, the novel destabilizes readers' conception of the human, asking them to move between their anthropocentric assumptions and Isserley's "alien" point of view; second, it exposes the constraints that language and concepts pose on intersubjective interaction, showing any form of "mercy" to be fundamentally "murky" (to quote one of the novel's pivotal scenes); third, it calls attention to the strangeness of consciousness itself in a universe dominated by brute matter and strict physical laws. The result of these interrogations is a sophisticated novel that demonstrates literature's power to probe what Cora Diamond has called the "difficulty of reality."