Reading Journal

I have seen many people lump this book along with other works of extreme horror and I personally do not agree with that classification. It is absolutely a work that depicts horror, and there have been many points throughout the novel that have forced me to put the book down and take a lap otherwise I would feel sick, but it never felt gratuitous. It definitely will give you a shock, but the way these moments are depicted lacks the crude edginess that I find more common in splatter punk, and are instead introduced through mechanical, cold and detached lenses. There is judgment, there is a bloody description. But it's not visceral (pun not intended).

Marcos Tejo, our protagonist, lives through this world with what I would call a double life. On the outside he depicts himself as this cold, detached, and perfectly adjusted man. Someone who has gone through hardships sure, but he intentionally isolates himself from the rest of the world. After all, what's the point of creating human connection when the whole concept of what it means to be human and what allows you to be seen as one instead of just meat, is getting more and more blurry by the day?

On the inside, Marcos is a cynical, judgmental individual, who seems to hold himself to quite the higher moral ground. He takes care of his demented father, he gives his grieving wife space, he is a diligent worker despite hating his job, he is against The Transition and has turned to veganism.

And at first glance like many, you look at this and say "Ah he is a good man. He is a kind person. He is just trapped in these circumstances."

Is he?

The answer, if you pay attention, has been given to us since the beginning. In the first chapter, as Marcos tells us about the messed up world we are now plunged into, he talks to us about how his father reacted to this horrifying change, along with many others : He went mad.

And really isn't that truly what someone who has strong integrity and morals would do in a situation like this? Go insane? Cry out at the atrocity? Refuse to accept it as a new normality?

We are introduced to another character that went mad, one of Marcos workers who we are told is a learned man despite the blue collar job he does. He is also on the front line of this horror. And he can't accept it, ending up with taking his life.

Marcos too is against the change and is horrified by how quickly it all happened. And in weak protest he refuses to eat meat. But he still shows up at work, at the slaughter house, and he doesn't just show up, he is an integral part of this job. He works at one of the most prestigious slaughter houses, and he handles everything with great efficiency. He excuses this by repeating that he has to take care of the sick father, something that he wouldn't need to do if his sister which he is extremely critical of, would help. He also appreciates the job because it gives him something else to think about since he is separated with his wife and has recently lost his son. And he keeps piling up excuses to justify his silence and compliancy, while spitting venom against any other cog of this meat chopping machine.

Especially the women.

He can be scared by the men. He can be disturbed by the men, he pities them, he understands them, he can be harsh but never unforgiving. Even with the worst of the worst he looks at them and accepts it that this is their nature.

The women don't receive the same leniency. He despises his sister, who has perfectly assimilated herself into this world, although more than one scene makes it obvious she is clawing at reality with all she has. The second his father starts to degenerate, he becomes venomous towards the nurse that for years has taken care of him, tossing her aside since she is no longer needed. He assaults Spamel, stating more than once that he wants to hurt and break her, envious of her ability to shut out everything and everyone, turning, twisting what she has once done with him in a humiliation ritual. Disrespecting his grieving wife calling her broken ( which i read as him referring to both her mental state and her inability to carry out successful pregnancy or give him an healthy child) and when Jasmin appears in his life, he stops trying to reach for her, stop hoping she will return and actually refers to her at his ex wife in a single moment towards the end accusing her of having taken too long and that she couldn't possibly expect him to wait for her forever. Not now that he has what he wanted.

At the start, before the second half of the book, I believed, stupidly, that this would turn into an almost father daughter relationship, that he would care for her and give her back her humanity. But the second I read the phrase "She is 8 months pregnant" I knew what this was about. And it becomes increasingly more obvious as time goes. He treats her like a pet, drawing a number of parallels between how he treated his dogs and other animals and how he threatens her. The moment that consolidated this to me was when he brings her under the three, mirroring an anecdote he shared about his two dogs, he keeps repeating that she is incapable of thinking. Never really giving her the chance to be seen as human.

Only when Jasmine has done what he needed her to do (give him a son) does drop the mask (And welcomes back his wife, because he needs her to be a mother to his child and a nurse) and disposes of Jasmine, knowing she has become too self aware.

Because in a world where everything is permitted if you just use the right words for it, why can't he take what he wants? He was "against the system" but really he just needed to find a way to exploit it in his favor.

The language in this book is a crucial theme, it is reiterated multiple times, to the point that the language becomes a character. We aren't described how a new character looks but we are told every time about how they speak, what their words sound, feel and taste like. They are people because they can talk. Jasmine can't, so… The language around the new industry of the meat changed to obfuscate the violence, censoring reality, allowing for an easy trick to look something in the face and still not give it a name. It is reminiscent to me of the way people have been self censoring in today's social media, saying "Unalive" instead of Killing or "Suer Side" instead of Suicide, "Grape or SA" instead of Rape, "PDF File" instead of Pedophile. Words that are considered icky or jarring...when that's exactly what they are meant for. Words used to hide the horror, as the book says. Making us insensitive to the violence, making it "Easier to digest" (second pun not intended).

And in the end Tejo still uses that clean censored language because he knows that the consequences are… we don't know exactly. It's treated more as a social cue than a crime. Like farting in public. .

We are all Marcos Tejo when we choose to be silent and compliant.

When you look away from the news, when you redirect that political conversation, when you act un surprised at the new conflict that has blown up, look at your plate :what are you eating?

The book also makes it obvious as to how they went so far without complications. The first to die and be eaten were the undesirable. The immigrants, the homeless, the ones living at the edges of society who no one would look for. And that opens the Pandora box of "what is the limit?"

The criminals don't go to prison animore, the go to the slaughter house. People immolate themselves through an holy ritual that no one believes in. If you walk out at the wrong our you can disappear, no point in looking for you. You are now meat.

Meat is meat.

This world is a boiling pot and everyone is a frog sitting in it not realizing that their time is running out. We see it with the attack of the camion by the necrofages, and everyone's immediate fear is that they will learn to donit again and it will become a spread issue. But it reflects in Marcos who so easily tosses away all his moralism the second he sees a chance for personal gain. The new generations are growing insensitive and alienated, playing a game where they guess what they would taste like. How long before a brother eats another, and a new, more horrifying myth of Able and Cain is created?

Final considerations and conclusion:

An element of this book that was inescapable for me was the reminder that this has happened. There has been more than once a time in history where people stopped being people, where the language around them changed and their personhood was stripped. It happened with the enslavement of black people in America, and the encampment of Jewish people under nazi Germany. We read this book and see it as unthinkable, we look at the past and look at it as a barbaric uneducated and ignorant version of the world, we are better now, we know better. And this book is just a book. A horrible take that once you close the page will disappear.

The death penalty is still in use in 55 countries.

Women are being stripped of their rights, reproductive and social ones.

There are 3 genocides currently happening.

The ice is melting.

This was a very very hard book to read. Partially because of the themes of this book and the events in it are terribly real and concrete especially considering the last few years since 2020, with all the numerous conflicts that have been popping up. But also because this isn't the tale of a strong mother fighting against the circumstances to bring her children to safety. Eilish doesn't fight, nor she run. She remains frozen in place by fear and anger and because of that she looses everything. I can't and do not want to judge Eilish despite her being a fictional character, but her motivation and reasoning, despite how...counteractive they might be, are unfortunately very realistic and can be understood and that is what makes this an uncomfortable book. There aren't gruesome scenes or overly detailed descriptions of violence. Everything is seen through this almost poetic and reflective lens. Paul Linch, being he Irish, follows the seemingly Irish literary tradition of not using speech quotes or common punctuation ( something that i find very interesting but i couldn't find any explanation as to why, so if anyone knows please feel free to explain.) it crated this sense of flow state where everything merges together. The chapters are long but broken in many small vignettes of an everyday life that slowly goes falling apart. We don't start the book with a Coup or a revolution. But neither is an already established government. It's that awkward stage in a dictatorship where you can see the real underbelly of the beast beginning to show. What started as a momentary solution becomes a temporary necessity till it turns in to a fully stated law. At the very beginning of the book we are introduced to a thought: Is reality real or just a fantasy? Reality is created on the bases of laws, laws that we all believe to be sturdy and indestructible. But when those laws get changed, twisted, or erased, what happens to reality, to your every day life? Are you really awake? Do you really have a choice? Just think of what happened in our lives in the past 7 years. Things that a decade ago were unthinkable now are concrete and we deal with them every day. That theme remains present throughout the book, moved by two factors: Eilish dreams and Louis ( her father)'s Alzheimer. Eilish after the arrest of her husband is tormented by dreams, nightmares, and slowly by the end of the book, her mind is completely tethered by the trauma where she struggles to see true and false. Louis similarly since the beginning of the book has been deteriorating, his reality has stopped to be that of everyone's else long ago, constantly stuck between present and past and future. He still manages to heed some solid advices to Eilish, but she never takes them seriously. What was most frustrating was Eilish obtuse fake optimism "Everything will return to normal soon." Even when they are under fire and bombardment she insists that things will soon change. Only when towards the end of the book, she thinks she's about to die, does she realize the fault of her thinking.

By the end of the book, Eilish lost her husband and her two male sons. There wasn't much to be done about her husband, he got unjustly incarcerated and he is never seen again in the book. That event becomes the ball and chain that keeps Eilish anchored to place. Despite the many opportunities, the many people that urge her to leave, she makes the unreasonable decision of staying, putting at risk the life of her children. Speaking of the children, they all have perfectly valid reactions to the situation. Ben is just a toddler, but Mark, the eldest, almost gets drafter and decides that instead of running away and hide he wants to stay and fight, he wants to take revenge on the people who have taken his father. Molly the second child, initially is also on the fighting stance, but slowly she becomes empty and depressed, loosing herself, Eilish still doesn't take any chances of leaving, continuing to sing this lie that everything will get back to normal. Molly will eventually become much more competent and strong, but only once she realizes that her mother is not reliable anymore and she has to take charge. A very hard thing to do at 15. Eilish says that she sees the moment her daughter becomes an adult, when she has to leave to take Bailey to the hospital, leaving Molly with the baby.

Speaking of Bailey, he might be the most heartbreaking character. He is 13. The world is falling apart around him and he doesn't even understand why, he doesn't know what is happening and he is so full of anger that he doesn't know where to put, so he takes it out on his mother, accusing her of everything that is happening to them. An in a way i can't fault him beca Eilish is responsible for how things end. She was selfish and a coward, she hid behind a lie to comfort herself and didn't think about the bigger picture, she looked straight up at a thunderstorm approaching and still refused to believe rain would come.