Tender is the Flesh Review (with spoilers)

 ‘Tender is the Flesh’ is another novel that I have learned about from the people I follow on Instagram and have read great reviews about. The concept of dystopian society in which all the animals have a virus that would kill people, so people that are left are left to breed, raise, butcher and eat other humans that are specifically made for that purpose. I am an omnivore that enjoys a good steak and grew up with grandparents who raised pigs and chicken for meat. For that reason, I went into this book expecting it to make me feel incredibly uncomfortable and get me thinking about the relationship between humans and farm animals. I expected to change something about the way I see animals and their purpose for humanity, but this left me feeling like an interesting concept was written in a quite underwhelming way and it was quite disappointing.

The story follows Marcos, a man working in a processing plant that is now processing humans for meat consumption instead of animals. The government implemented ‘The Transition’ and now strictly controlled human meat is used much in the same way as farm animals. Marcos is haunted by this job, evident in the fact that he does not eat meat at all, but also by personal issues. His infant son died and his wife left him, he borderline hates his sister and his father suffers from dementia and is in a nursing home. The catalyst of the novel though is when he gets a female from a business partner. At first, he is resistant to her and does not know what to do, but after a while actually impregnates her and makes her carry his baby. At the end, he actually murdered her because ‘She had the human look of a domesticated animal’.

For me, the idea of following a man so haunted by society he is forced to live and participate in was still quite compelling and interesting, but I feel like a huge chance has been missed here. The book is brutal and visceral, as it explains the way the meat is processed in excruciating detail and explains how despite the fact the people bred for meat are not seen as people, euphemisms are used to avoid thinking about that. However, so much of the book focused only on Marcos and his story and to be honest I did not care so much about him and his personal story. His trips to the abandoned zoo could have been so interesting, but were so incredibly dull for me. The author did not make me care for Marcos or his situation at all, and I found myself getting bored reading about it. Marcos as a character was not nearly developed enough for me to care about him. Other characters I cared even less about. Following him in the factory and explanations of how this new system worked and the ethical issues that arose with it were far more interesting but were not frequent enough for me.

Speaking of ethical discussions, this concept could have borne so many discussions about humanity and our treatment of animals across cultures. This was not present in the novel to any satisfactory degree. It seems like every time the characters even start discussing the morality of this system, that is needed for survival of humans, the discussion is interrupted by something else less interesting. The concept stayed at surface level and went more for shock and brutality than anything substantial or offering any new ways of looking at the world. It was just one brutal scene of torturing these non-human humans after another, followed by Marcos talking about his life that I could not make myself care about. This book was just really boring and needed more rounds of editing to make it compelling enough.

For example, his visit to the lab where the horrific experiments were done on the ‘heads’ as they called them was the one that stayed with me as it reminded me that there was an ideology that saw a race of people as non-humans and really did these and even worse experiments on them. This visit is short and Marcos is judgemental and has a holier-than-thou attitude. There was nothing deeper than ‘look, humans are awful creatures that torture others’ that honestly got really old after a while. An interesting place was also the ranch where the rich can hunt ‘heads’ including those with debt that can get rid of debt if they survive enough. I am not entirely sure how this was so boring and dull, but it somehow was.

The concept of Marcos naming the female that he then raped and impregnated was shocking nd unexpected, mostly because of how bloody hypocritical it was. On one hand, Marcos heavily judged his sister for keeping ‘heads’ for meat, but then he did something even worse? I am not sure why and how the author expected her readers to care for Marcos and his wife when they treat this female this way. Maybe the point is to show that Marcos is falling down the rabbit hole and is a hypocritical flawed human being that did this to save his marriage. It is clear in the way he treated Jasmine that he did not see her as human at all, and more like a useful animal, but then the idea that Marcos is somehow more moral than others loses any meaning.

The biggest issue was not that the book was bleak or dark, but the fact it was so awfully boring. Instead of a dynamic and deep exploration of the human condition and relationship with other creatures we use for consumption, ‘Tender is the Flesh’ was a surface level, dull story full of torture porn with seemingly nothing interesting to say. For me, this is one of the worst crimes in literature, a waste of a really good concept. The characters were bland to the point of caricature, the plot and the underlying message almost non-existent. I rated it ⅖ for the concept and idea, but this was a massive disappointment and let-down.

Did you read this book? What did you think about it?

source:pushkinpress.com