“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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