Tender Is the Flesh by Agustina Bazterrica review – a prizewinning Argentinian dystopia

“There are words that cover up the world,” thinks the protagonist of this prizewinning Argentinian dystopia. In our world of industrialised farming, we talk about “gestation crates” and “insemination phases”. 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. Marcos runs a factory that raises and slaughters humans, and is intimately involved with every stage of production. “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 supplies butchers, tanneries, laboratories, even a mysterious game reserve, and is our tour guide through the horrors. He shows us a “head” being killed and butchered – a process familiar to anyone who’s seen inside an abattoir. 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. And how, after curfew, all bets are off: with the taboo on cannibalism removed, there’s now a brisk trade in black market flesh. “Special meat” fulfils hygiene regulations and comes with a high price tag; “easy meat” is “meat with a first and last name”. 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.

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. He is a man in shock not just at the undeniably shocking new reality but at the loss of his young son. 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. 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”.

The eerie, depopulated landscape is reminiscent of another intensely effective Argentinian shocker, Samanta Schweblin’s Fever Dream. That novel was a shifting, unstable fantasia inspired by fears about GM and environmental degradation; in Tender Is the Flesh, the metaphorical equivalence with factory farming is blatant, served up to us with relish. And where the critique of carnivorousness in Michel Faber’s Under the Skin was produced by estrangement, making the taste for human flesh literally an alien matter, here it’s done through familiarity. It is all too easy, Bazterrica demonstrates, to imagine eating our sentient fellows. We do it already; we’ve built the infrastructure.

It’s true that cannibalism is both unthinkable and repeatedly thought about. Though the “special meat” of Tender Is the Flesh offers a pleasing echo of that mysterious, addictive “special stuff” sold in the Royston Vasey butcher’s, when quizzed if it was intended to be human flesh the League of Gentlemen writers scoffed that there was “nothing more mundane than cannibalism”. Bazterrica’s obvious antecedent here is Soylent Green, which gets a mention as a banned film viewed via the dark web (that vision of climate crisis, authoritarian government and resource famine, it is salutary to note, is set in 2022).

She also draws on the conventions of horror, steadily ramping up the revulsion and introducing a hammily vampiric Romanian in charge of the game reserve who says things like “Since the world began, we’ve been eating each other” and “‘Let us take pleasure in the atrocity.” But Marcos’s main obsession is not flesh but language: how we construct the world out of words, how we speak the unspeakable, and how we negotiate the gap between words and reality. In a narrative otherwise so blunt and blood-spattered, he piles metaphor on simile as he tries to convey the weight of others’ words – his wife’s voice “a river of lights, an aerial torrent” when discussing the child they might have, then uttering only “black holes” when grieving his death; his sister’s speech “like boxes filled with blank paper”, smelling “of confinement, of intense cold”. When he visits a laboratory experimenting on humans, the only way he can think of to defy the Mengele-like scientist in charge – whose words “are like tiny tadpoles dragging themselves along” – is to withhold his own speech.

But if this is a fable about the inadequacy of language in the face of darkness, it also resonates with sadness at the prospect of the silence humans can expect when we are alone in the world, in the wake of mass extinctions. This provocative, sorrowful novel expertly wields a double-edged cleaver: when Marcos points out that “in the end, meat is meat, it doesn’t matter where it’s from”, it’s a statement of both dystopic extremity and banal everyday fact.

• Tender Is the Flesh, translated by Sarah Moses, is published by Pushkin (RRP £14.99). To order a copy go to guardianbookshop.com. Free UK p&p over £15.