Argentinian novelist Agustina Bazterrica’s second novel Tender is the Flesh is an unsettling reflection of human brutality.
The premise is simple. It’s extrapolation profound.
Animals are infected by a virus, making them lethal to humans. The human solution, kill all the animals. To take the place of animals in the food chain, governments “transition” to what is euphemistically called special meat, human flesh.
Bazterrica’s vision of this legitimised cannibalism transposes the exploitation of animals, currently practiced around the world, onto humans. Think Eloi and Morlocks from HG Wells’ 1895 classic The Time Machine but we’re the Morlocks, on an industrial scale.
We experience this grim future through Marcos, a manager at one of the most prestigious processing plants in the country; they don’t call them slaughterhouses anymore. His wife moved out following the sudden death of their infant son. His beloved father is in the latter stages of dementia brought on, Marcos thinks, by the transition.
Many people suffered an acute depression and gave up on life, others dissociated themselves from reality, some simply committed suicide.
Bazterrica creates this same feeling of dissociation by writing Marcos entirely in the third person. “He enters the tannery.” “He enters the breeding centre.” “He picks up the club… and hits her on the forehead.” It feels like being removed, there but not, slowly unraveling.
Most of us never consider the process that goes into meat production, the violence involved in slaughtering an animal, but as Marcos walks us through the mechanics of slaughtering humans and preparing their carcass in vast quantities, we become helpless observers of the slaughter.
To make the killing possible all trace of identity is stripped from those destined to be food. Turning heads into herds, they become nameless products, numbers on a page. You can’t shave the head of a person to sell their hair, or drain a lactating female to sell her milk, if you consider them a person. Heads even have their vocal cords surgically removed so they’re more submissive and won’t scream when they’re slaughtered. Once done, society is free to engage in any number of cruelties, anything can be rationalised, no matter how disturbing.
Marcos marches us through scenarios that are as plausible as they are cruel. Tanneries and breeding centres. A game reserve where rich hunters can chase and kill prey they later eat. A research laboratory where specimens are subjected to all kinds of tortures, tests and experiments, in the name of science.
He introduces the Church of the Immolation, a cult that protests this legalised cannibalism by sacrifices themselves into the food chain, and the Scavengers, societies outsiders living beyond the fence of the processing plant, given Church of the Immolation sacrifices by Marcos.
The immolated person can’t be told their body will be disembowelled, torn apart, chewed up and devoured by an outcast, an undesirable.
Marcos is a man haunted by what’s been lost, tormented by the reality of this brave new world, its decadence, its hypocrisy. Then he’s gifted a First Generation Pure woman by one of his clients. Stamped twenty times “one for each of her years in the breeding centre” could she be his salvation? The answer to that question might be the most disturbing reply of the book.
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