Maps of Our Spectacular Bodies: Longlisted for the Booker Prize

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Anne had insisted she be there. She had accompanied Lia to her chemotherapy sessions a few times before, and Lia was convinced Anne had decided hospitals were safe, perhaps even ideal environments for Mothers Making Amends. It was the fact of their being supervised by nurses, perhaps. Restricted by noise regulations. Rooted to the place, immovable, through the drip in Lia’s arm. Lia was trying not to feel pleased to see her. She had made a song for the cold cap chemo hours. To remedy the boredom, the strange, relentless pain. Lia and Iris often made songs. This was not one of their best; they’d just rewritten the words to ‘Daisy Bell’ with its marriages and carriages and looking sweet on a bicycle seat. It had been hummed so frequently by Lia’s father that its tune had etched itself At home, Lia climbed to the safety of the fifth stair, where no notable events ever took place, and sat there a while, hugging her knees. She wished she had let Harry come with her. He would be waiting for the call. The only thing worse than hearing the news was having to tell it. She felt quietly grateful not to have to witness the dulling of his eyes, the panic sinking in his cheeks. Iris remembered staring at her shit in the toilet bowl after two weeks of beetroot, feeling superhuman. Maddie Mortimer was longlisted for the Booker Prize in 2022. She was born in London in 1996 to a family of writers: both her mother and her maternal grandfather were also authors.

What I think is most impressive about the book is that put all the experimentation to one side and this would still be a deeply thoughtful book about the human condition with a complex and involving plot and a series of fully realised characters. 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 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. As she confronts what might be the end, memories of her own childhood and a passionate love affair come rushing into her present, unearthing buried secrets and her family’s deepest fears. But Lia still has hope . . . for more time, for more love, for more Iris.Rather paradoxically, and maybe even troublingly, I felt closer to, more intimate with, the cancer taking possession of Lia’s body than I did Lia. The third-person narration of Lia’s story, split between the present-day fallout from her diagnosis and her adolescent goings-on at a pastoral English vicarage twenty-plus years previous, is traditional, almost old-fashioned, clipped. The first-person voice of Lia’s cancer, on the other hand (really it’s inaccurate to call it ‘Lia’s cancer’: there’s a primal, ancient, omnipotent, uncontainable edge to it), is gleeful, jokerish, charismatic; Lewis Carol’s Cheshire Cat welcoming the carnage wrought by its cellular cousins. The cancer is at least one step ahead of Lia at all times and, therefore, so are we, the readers. In a remarkable moment of dramatic irony, we find out the cancer is in Lia’s brain before she’s told ‘ It’s in your brain. Here’ and then ‘ It’s everywhere’ by her oncologist (255). I wrote it as a way of spending time with her, working through grief and the intense period of experiencing someone die,” she added. “So having the book out in the world as a piece of us and our relationship is one thing. Having it win the Desmond Elliott prize is extraordinary and deeply moving. I wish she was here to see it.” Something gleeful and malign is moving in Lia’s body. It shape-shifts down the banks of her canals, leaks through her tissue, nooks and nodes. It taps her trachea like the bones of a xylophone. It’s spreading.

I'm glad I listened to the audiobook because it was superbly narrated by Tamsin Greig and Lydia Wilson who were phenomenal. Their reading emphasized the text's musicality and playfulness. Apparently, this is also one of those novels that play with typography, paragraphs and images. I'm a fan. Iris looked up to the ceiling and laughed one of her wide-open golden laughs and said, No no no, you’re just saying that because you’re old. Old people can be bright too. 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 The 2021 Desmond Elliott prize was awarded to AK Blakemore for The Manningtree Witches, a historical novel about Essex witch trials in the 17th century. Previous winners include Lisa McInerney, Preti Taneja and Francis Spufford.Round and round it went as the hours rung on, the rhythms and notes folding over each other like spells that could cure, that sore something, rising and rattling in awful interludes. This striking novel takes a formally inventive approach to a woman’s terminal-cancer diagnosis... Sadness is not allowed to crowd out wit and joy, and Mortimer asks readers to think about death as something that 'does not happen in the first or third person, but in the second.'" — The New Yorker Maps of Our Spectacular Bodies marks Maddie Mortimer as a major new literary voice’– Lyndsey Fineran