Albert Sánchez Piñol, 2002

Cold Skin was written by Albert Sánchez Piñol in 2002, and has been translated into 37 languages. That statement alone should mean that I don’t have to spend however many words telling you how good it is. But I’m going to. Because it’s good. It’s really good.

The book opens with our narrator being dropped off on an island, there to study weather patterns. It’s implied throughout the novel that he’s seen action in the first world war, but Piñol doesn’t specify exactly how, when or where. Hell, I’m only assuming it’s the first world war because of the time frame. We’re really given very little to work with in regards to back story. This ensures that the ‘real world’ exists in a sort of fog-like memory – something beyond our ability to reach. Him being stranded on an island works wonderfully with this concept of tangible ‘society’ being out of reach, and assuming Piñol did this on purpose then it’s a stroke of genius.

He quickly meets Gruner, as well as the ‘natives’ for want of a better term. He holes up in Gruner’s lighthouse after his own shack is burned down, and much of the story takes place within the topmost room of the lighthouse – the only man-made structure for hundreds of miles.

It’s tempting to look at this through the eyes of post-Colonialism and think that Piñol is making a commentary on the white imperialists rocking up at someone else’s home and declaring ‘this is mine now’. It’s certainly something we’re going to keep in mind, but not something I’m going to explore with any real depth.

It’s important that our understanding of the island’s inhabitants, which shall here-onwards be call the Inhabitants, evolves alongside our protagonist’s. When he first meets them he believes them to be mindless beasts. He kills them without hesitation, and quickly joins Gruner in his until-then one man war. They cut them down in swathes, coming up with increasingly more intricate and violent means of doing so.

Until now we’ve only ever seen the dog-like Aneris as the sole non-violent Inhabitant. She’s kept as a slave, and serves as a kind of early warning system for an Inhabitant attack, as well as being something for Gruner to rape. It’s only when our unnamed protagonist decides to retrieve some explosives from a wrecked ship that we see a different side to the Inhabitants. He encounters children, baby Inhabitants playing in the water. As time goes by he comes to appreciate that they are their own society.

The image of him having gone to the ends of the earth to escape society only to encounter a brand new one is obviously rather poignant. It’s not really something Piñol addresses though, so it’s just something that we as the readers are allowed to mull over ourselves. This realisation, however, does not stop our protagonist from attempting genocide along with Gruner. They use the explosives to kill untold hundreds of Inhabitants, and the protagonist is forced to recognise that the crying noises he hears from the sea are actually the signs of deep mourning. He’s not longer sort-of-unsure; now he knows they’re a society. They’re defending their home from the invaders. From he and Gruner. He has a Mitchell and Webb-like ‘are we the baddies?’ epiphany.

Eventually he starts to fall in love with Aneris, and manages to convince himself that it’s a two way connection. Piñol doesn’t say if it is or isn’t, so we’re left to decide for ourselves. Aneris certainly treats the protagonist with more affection than she does Gruner, but that’s not saying much. Gruner beats and rapes her – just because she doesn’t fight off our protagonist when he makes his advances, doesn’t mean it’s love… she doesn’t fight Gruner either. She’s a slave.

She’s an interesting character though, because it’s made abundantly clear that she’s not being held against her will. It’s difficult to say what keeps her in Gruner’s lighthouse. We only see one other Inhabitant co-exist domestically with the protagonist and Gruner, and this is an orphan of the massacre. He latches on to the protagonist, often literally, and readily moves into the lighthouse with them. It’s implied later that the protagonist suspects the boy of being a spy once he sees him talking to other Inhabitants in the woods. It’s important to notice though, that this all comes at the time that our protagonist is starting to see the Inhabitants as being human-like. Before now they were animals, monsters – creatures to be annihilated. But now they’re mothers, fathers, friends… orphans.

This is a large point of contention between our protagonist and Gruner – because Gruner can’t accept that they’re a civilization. Not because he doesn’t believe it, but because he can’t believe it. He can justify massacring monsters, but to accept that he’s killing ‘advanced’ beings is too much for him. He can’t be the bad guy.

It ends with Gruner being torn to pieces by the Inhabitants after having gone mad, brought on by the realisation that the only real monster on the island is him. Man is the monster after all. A little cliched maybe, but trust me: in this story it honestly works.

Our protagonist decides to stay on the island when the ship comes to pick him up. They address him as ‘Gruner’, raising the possibility that our Gruner may not even have been the original Gruner. They give him a new weather inspector, who is promptly assaulted by the Inhabitants in the same way our protagonist was. It’s all cyclical. Our protagonist, the new Gruner, begrudgingly invites the new weather inspector into the lighthouse, lacking in civility as much as the old Gruner. It’s implied that together they’ll do what they can to fight off the Inhabitants, while our new Gruner keeps Aneris to himself. He forces her into a shabby jumper, just as old Gruner had, and presumably does what he can to forget that she’s not a monster.

We have “Gruner”. We have a weather official. We have Aneris, and we have the Inhabitants. The stage is set for it all to begin again.