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BOOK REVIEW Tender Is the Flesh (2019)

for more reviews of horror fiction, see my blog: thelibraryatborleyrectory.wordpress.com
 
A simple bit of advice: don’t read this novel while eating a Big Mac, or really any meat dish, fast food or haute cuisine. Tender Is the Flesh, an Argentinan novel about a world where animal meat has been declared inedible and replaced with human, is one of the most disturbing novels I’ve read. This is due as much to how the content is delivered, in spare and clinical prose, as the content itself. It’s a dystopian novel like few others, making some of even the most fearsome fictional futures seem like utopias. I really can’t stress enough that this isn’t a novel you want to read if you’re of a sensitive disposition when it comes to the literature you consume. I’m not sure myself if I could stand it as a film.
 
The temptation is to describe one of its many horrors as a (pardon the expression) taster, though it’s hard to pick which one, there are so many. Maybe this: at one point we learn that pregnant female “heads” (the name for humans bred as cattle) are de-limbed so as to prevent them from smashing their bellies against the bars of their cages, which they do to save their children from life in a processing plant. If you can take that without vomiting, you might be ready for this book.
 
The storytelling is simple and direct in the style of dystopian fable, the straightforward linear plot serving as an entry into the world of the book. Through the perspective of a wealthy meat-processor, Marcos, we learn that animals were slaughtered wholesale after the government pronounced that they were infected with a fatal virus. In what became known as the Transition, a populace desperate for meat turned to cannibalism, which was eventually legitimised and turned into a thriving industry. Now it’s illegal to even talk about human chattel in certain ways and with certain words, so enforced is the practice of disassociating them from your friends and family. Illiterate and branded, they become animals.
 
Marcos is a numb and inwardly broken figure, going about his duties with a secret disgust for them, traumatised by the recent cot-death of his infant son. He continues to work in processing because he needs the money to pay for his elderly father’s care. But then he’s gifted a piece of chattel, a young woman, and grows fond of her…
 
It’s probably too easy to think of the book as a vegan parable, though that’s one interpretation. What it reminded me of was letters from Nazi administrators at concentration camps, to their loved ones, describing the weather and what they had for lunch while alluding vaguely to the regulated killing of Jewish captives. What the book is about, I think, is the way in which societies and governments can condition their followers to accept any barbarity, any cruelty, so long as it’s happening to someone else and not them. In Tender Is the Flesh, average middle-class people do things that would stand out in a serial killer’s memoirs.
 
A sketch by the comedian Sacha Baron Cohen comes to mind, wherein he convinces a real person that if he touches a spot on an iPad protestors with political views he disagrees with will die. The man never sees the victims, doesn’t hear them groan and fall, and is therefore happy to commit murder based on a political difference.
 
I’d have liked a little more plot. The growing relationship between Marcos and Jasmine, the name he gives the chattel woman, is spread very thin. The novel is more about giving you a guided tour of the world its author creates, however, so while it is drier on incident than some of the classics of its dystopian genre it earns its place among them. Also, the novel’s last chapter is so hard and cold and shocking, yet such a perfect conclusion to all that’s come before, that it justifies the thinness of plot. It’s an ending on the dark dystopian scale of 1984’s, with Winston weeping over his love for Big Brother, yet more viscerally savage.
 
Do I recommend Tender Is the Flesh? If you want to read a book about a cannibal dystopia, yes. If you’re even slightly on the fence about such a thing, no. This is a tough read, one to give your nightmares nightmares.
Written by The_Silly_Sibyl (Jack Thomas)
Published
Author's Note
Rights to the image belong to Pushkin Press, publisher of the pictured, 2020 edition
All writing remains the property of the author. Don't use it for any purpose without their permission.
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