Maps of Our Spectacular Bodies: Longlisted for the Booker Prize

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Mortimer certainly deserves praise for inventiveness, but her approach isn’t entirely without precedent. Over the years, we have already met all manner of unlikely narrators. Remember Nutshell (2016), Ian McEwan’s re-working of Hamlet as told by an unborn foetus? Jenny Diski’s Like Mother (1988), meanwhile, was narrated by a baby born without a brain. In My Name is Red (1998), Orhan Pamuk utilised a whole chorus of strange narrators, from a severed head, a tree, a gold coin, and even the colour crimson. And Markus Zusak went all in when he decided to have the grim reaper himself narrate The Book Thief (2005). The feet are incredible things…. each ligament is connected to a very specific part of your body …. When Iris was seven, her teacher asked everyone to write down what their parents’ jobs were and also suggested they drew a picture as a Creative Exercise. Should the disembodied voice be interpreted as a personification of cancer? On the one hand, it explains with relish that “when pain replaces the proteins in [Lia’s] skin […] I’m in”. On the other hand, it knows a lot of trivia – about subjects ranging from Sex and the City to the nerve endings in the human clitoris, to female campers in Yellowstone national park – and makes very human, very lyrical pronouncements, such as that the cello is “the wisest instrument”. Fineran said the novel was a “standout read” in a “very strong list”. Brown added: “It’s an incredibly inventive and, at times, genius novel, seamlessly blending competing values from science and religion to bluntness and subtlety.”

The cancer uncovers Lia’s tumultuous and troubled first love, Matthew, and her troubled relationship with her religious mother, Anne. At the same time, it becomes imperative to Lia, a creative children’s book illustrator, to finish her latest project before it's too late. Iris ends up continuing the project after her mother perishes. It would be neglectful of me to omit the part Iris plays in this. It is revealed at the end of the book that Matthew was her biological father, not Harry. I suspected this throughout the book, so it wasn’t too surprising, as Matthew was important to Lia for the longest time. She literally is half Lia and half Matthew, the bridge between Lia’s past and future. As one life is coming to an end, another is just finding her way in the world. And it is from these two, rather experimental, narrative threads that the book was initially woven. Her mother began to doze off, the wrinkles on her forehead tumbling between her brows, piling up on the arch of her nose. She looked so odd, so old, so tired. Anne seemed out of place everywhere except church. Lia used to marvel at the way her mother’s form would slot into church, as if the two made each other whole, somewhat understandable. After Peter’s services, while he was at the front Playing Priest Perfectly and the church was squeezing the congregation out two by two by two, Lia would catch her mother turning to face the altar, gazing up at the dove and the olive branch pieced into the window, receiving, it would seem, direct instructions from the Lord Himself. Catching the end of a secret meant only for her. This is the best book about cancer I’ve read in a long time. That’s mainly because it’s not just a book about cancer. Unlike many others within the genre, Mortimer doesn’t portray a battle-narrative. There is no hero’s journey of a strong-willed protagonist against a body in revolt, or a personified evil to be vanquished. Instead it’s the story of Lia as a whole, and everything her body holds: memories, heartbreak, love, regrets, experiences; cancer being but one of them. Yes, it’s the story of a body’s annihilation, but only secondary to being about the life it has lived.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. Not quite a noble steed, but a great mustard beast of a bike, which blazes its own spun hymn of chain against metal, and will no doubt serve devilish Red as well as Gringolet served Gawain, or Arion served Adrastus, or Marengo served Napoleon. I read this book due to its longlisting for the 2022 Desmond Elliott Prize and I have to say up front that a debut novelist, and in particular one in her mid-20s, simply has no right to write a book this good.

Maps of Our Spectacular Bodies is, one hopes, destined to be one of 2022's most talked about novels - one filled with such wisdom, as well as drawing-on and then developing so many literary inspirations, that it is hard to believe this is a debut novel by an author in her mid-20s. Already featured on the Desmond Elliott Prize for Debut Novels, one suspects Goldsmiths, Booker, Costa and Women's Prize recognition is to come. I think often of my early travelling days, when I was just getting accustomed to the theatre of disguise, finding ways of existing without being noticed. Owusu said that Mortimer had “penetrated the body and spirit of literature, taking an experience, one familiar to so many of us, and making it unique”.Lia has only one child, Iris; her magical, awkward, endlessly creative daughter who has just entered the battleground of her teenage years. Lia and Iris have always been close, but there is a war playing out inside Lia’s body, too, and everything is about to change.