Maps of Our Spectacular Bodies: Longlisted for the Booker Prize

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Harry never used to think awful things like this. The image floated to the electric bit at the very top of his brain and vanished. One can train awful thoughts to perform acts of all kinds, Harry thought, even vanishing acts. Lia did not know the extent of these thoughts, the extent to which they unravelled her husband. They had got steadily worse over the years and he knew it had a lot to do with this seeing Lia as a body, Yes. It’s an interactive language learning book. Supposed to encourage creative thinking. That sort of thing. A novel about a dying woman that is part narrated by both the disease that is killing her and the chemotherapy that is her only chance of survival isn’t going to be everyone’s cup of tea, but hear me out. Mortimer’s debut is actually a lot less experimental than it sounds, and it is also much more compelling and uplifting that one might expect. From an early age, Lia is made to feel suspicious of her body. She grows up in a vicarage, where the flesh that matters belongs to Christ. When she is 12, her parents, Anne and Peter, take in an adolescent boy, Matthew. Anne and Peter grow to love Matthew. So does Lia – but in a different way. The young man is heading for ordination, Anne and Peter believe, unaware of what goes on in Lia’s bedroom. Maps of Our Spectacular Bodies is the lyrical tale of a woman, her body and the illness that coinhabits it. Told from the perspectives of Lia herself, her daughter Iris and the (callous? Cynical? Caring…?) voice of the disease itself, we follow her life after a diagnosis of terminal cancer. Despite the fact that my head is still too full with it to write a proper-form review, here are three things you need to know:

Maps of Our Spectacular Bodies is the lyrical tale of a woman, her body and the illness that coinhabits it. Told from the perspectives of Lia herself, her daughter Iris and the (callous? Cynical? Caring…?) voice of the disease itself, we follow her life after a diagnosis of terminal cancer. A coming of age story, at the end of a life. Despite the fact that my head is still too full with it to write a proper-form review, here are three things you need to know:Maddie Mortimer's ambitious debut novel tells the story of Lia, who is diagnosed with cancer for a second time - this time she is going to die, leaving behind her husband and young daughter. The author, whose own mother died of breast cancer when she was 14, sensitively shows how family members experience the road to death - but what renders the text so striking is that the aesthetic implementation is particularly innovative. Mortimer experiments with questions of body perception and how they can be translated into literature. While the family story is told in the third person, a first-person voice guides the reader through the inside of Lia's body. Maps of Our Spectacular Bodies is a coming-of-age story at the end of a life. It’s the story of Lia, her husband and daughter as they deal with a terminal illness diagnosis that rewrites the family’s history from the inside out. Moving between Lia’s past and her present, the inside and outside of her body, Mortimer stretches the limit of the novel’s form, weaving poetry into her prose throughout. The novel was inspired by Mortimer’s mother, who died of cancer in 2010. Both doctor and Wikipedia said: when breast cancer spread to the lungs or liver it could be treated but could not be cured. He tries to scream, to shout, to call for the others. Nothing happens. The place remains as quiet as one would expect any left lung to be on a Thursday mid-afternoon. It is then that I realize – Lia’s first bid for escape is a forbidden and ultimately toxic teenage romance with an older boy who is an acolyte of her father, but it is not until she leaves home that she finally manages to begin living life on her own terms. Opening her university acceptance letter is a sensory experience, unleashing the “burnt tomorrow scent” of freedom into the air.

Really this description only touches the surface of a novel which is all about what goes on underneath that surface (both literally and figuratively – although the very distinction between literal and figurative, physical and mental, experience and memory is one the book implicitly rejects). The novel is most involving where the body is intensely present – as in the often ambivalent sex between Lia and Matthew – or painfully absent, as in an excruciating scene on a train where a man attempts to grope Lia’s breasts, only to find that they have been removed. Embodied experience is important to the plot, which turns on revelations about blood ties. The exploration of different kinship relationships is delicate and persuasive. Sperm cells moving through a uterus are compared to the people forced to leave the Chernobyl exclusion zone in 1986 Here is a book to dance and sing about. An extraordinary, kaleidoscopic dive into language."— Daisy Johnson, author of Sisters And increasingly the various already porous barriers in the book: the past and the present; the exterior and the interior; Lia’s body and thoughts and the almost constant presence in them of the cancer – largely disappear. So that for example the voice increasingly becomes part of Lia. And there is a remarkable scene with Lia and family attending a dance performance where the voice choreographs the set of internal characters (Yellow etc) on the exterior stage.

Both expansive and intimate, Maps of Our Spectacular Bodies is an intricate portrait of a life hurtling towards the inevitable. An extraordinary debut." —Kiran Millwood Hargrave, author of The Mercies

sometimes the prose was more fascinating and interesting - lyrical - and intellectually stimulating than experientially emotional. The central character Lia is largely inspired by Mortimer's mother, who died young after a long struggle with breast cancer, and cancer is obviously a dominant theme of the book. Despite this, Mortimer succeeds in making the book fresh, enjoyable to read and life affirming, and the language and style are extraordinary and innovative. Overall, Maps of Our Spectacular Bodies is a deeply moving novel with unexpected twists, written in a style that I haven’t seen before, a treasure, haunting, lingering. Because this is a remarkable book which combines a fresh voice and literary (as well as typographical) experimentation with a central idea which is universal (but I think seldom covered in fiction), resonant themes, and with a deep maturity in its empathetic understanding of people’s bodies and mind.

Maps of Our Spectacular Bodies is her first novel, some of which was written - between shifts in a vintage clothing outlet - in the Foyles bookshop cafe in London. Foyles commissioned Mortimer to write a personal blog about her work, in which she says:

Toxic masculinity is high among Mortimer’s concerns. The violent passion of Lia’s romance with Matthew is implicit in the description of her first kiss: “It is a remarkable thing that Lia’s senses did not rupture/there and then, that no one was harmed in the making/of the kiss.” Statements like these never sat well in his voice. He thought too deeply for such certainty, observed the world too rigorously. Lia tried not to let it frustrate her. It was a stupid idea. The book was too advanced for her; too advanced, she was sure, for a student of science. But she was trying, at least trying, to understand what was happening to her daughter's body.Lia sat on the end of her bed and drew out the shape of his language; the hills, the bends, the steady dips of it: Lia’s mother’s faith had a life of its own. It was huge, inscrutable. It entered rooms before she did, often announcing her arrival, and then obstructing everyone else from moving about. There was a silence. It was that particular stuffed silence full of the winning of something. Then Peter was opening the kitchen door, ignoring the eavesdropping Lia and welcoming the stranger in with apologies, questions, suggestions of tea. Lia heard her mother sigh and shuffle quietly over to the kettle, spitting a final squashed and caged, There will be family here. Friends new and old. Preserved. Untold. There will be half-drawn thoughts and dream-props and fragments of people she has passed in shops and they are all currently following the Smell of Starts to Stomach, where her instinct brews and wafts its stench.