The eerie, depopulated landscape is reminiscent of another intensely effective Argentinian shocker, Samanta Schweblin’s Fever Dream. But perhaps the biggest existential wound is the loss of animals: ever since they were eliminated to halt the spread of the virus, “there’s been a silence that nobody hears”. As he says, with the bitterest of ironies, “One can get used to almost anything, except the death of a child.” His father is sinking into dementia in a nursing home his grieving wife has retreated to her mother’s his sister is a shallow social climber, happy to follow YouTube tutorials on how to carve up your own domestic head at home. He is a man in shock not just at the undeniably shocking new reality but at the loss of his young son. If Marcos’s recap of the Transition and its ethical doublethink is sometimes heavy-footed (“He thinks: merchandise, another word that obscures the world”), the brusque, declarative narration and matter-of-fact staccato sentences are horribly effective.
Cremations have replaced funerals, for fear of bodies being snatched from hearses starving, flesh-maddened Scavengers lurk in the shadows while upstanding citizens buy human hands on a bed of lettuce (“Upper Extremity”) in butcher’s shops. “Special meat” fulfils hygiene regulations and comes with a high price tag “easy meat” is “meat with a first and last name”. And how, after curfew, all bets are off: with the taboo on cannibalism removed, there’s now a brisk trade in black market flesh. He tells us how the most superior meat is raised without growth accelerants or genetic modification how the vocal cords are removed because “meat doesn’t talk” how impregnated females must be restrained to stop them destroying their young. He shows us a “head” being killed and butchered – a process familiar to anyone who’s seen inside an abattoir. Marcos supplies butchers, tanneries, laboratories, even a mysterious game reserve, and is our tour guide through the horrors.
“The processing plant does business with several breeding centres, but he only includes those that provide the greatest quantity of heads on the meat circuit.” Marcos runs a factory that raises and slaughters humans, and is intimately involved with every stage of production. In the world of the novel, where cannibalism has become normalised after animals were wiped out by a global epidemic, euphemism is even more essential. In our world of industrialised farming, we talk about “gestation crates” and “insemination phases”. “T here are words that cover up the world,” thinks the protagonist of this prizewinning Argentinian dystopia.
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