‘Scottish by Formation’: Michel Faber’s Under the Skin and National Ambiguities

Across genre, form and multiple national borders, Michel Faber has spent his literary life evading detection, his oeuvre being marked out by a singular determination to keep moving. As he has said about his various major works, ‘I wanted to produce a radically different book each time’. Faber's emotional territory is unusually narrow and consistent; alienation, displacement, resilience, compassion and the consequences of its absence are recurring ingredients, as are an interest in how humans, animals and environments interact, each of these particularly evident in his breakthrough novel, Under the Skin, though the contexts in which these are explored are often so different as to make those common ingredients hard for the casual reader to detect. Faber lived in the Scottish Highlands for over twenty years from 1993, half a lifetime in which he went from being unpublished to being celebrated around the world, and despite his non-Scottish origins, within Scotland, for several decades now, he has routinely been recognized as a Scottish writer. This perception of Faber being Scottish persists even despite his move to England in 2016, after the death of his wife and most crucial collaborator, Eva. This article uses Under the Skin as a case study, examining how and why Faber has been considered ‘Scottish by Formation’.