Maps of Our Spectacular Bodies by Maddie Mortimer

Review by Eleanor Updegraff

It is rare, in adult fiction, to encounter a non-human narrator – still more unusual when that narrator is almost (though not 100 per cent) certainly a cancer. Yet in Maps of Our Spectacular Bodies, the astonishing debut novel by Maddie Mortimer, absolutely nothing is straightforward, and so it stands to reason that this bold-type voice, which introduces itself as ‘I, itch of ink, think of thing’, should be neither animal, vegetable nor mineral, but a collection of malignant cells.

Though the true identity of the ‘I’ is never confirmed, it becomes quickly apparent that it lives somewhere inside the body of Lia, a forty-three-year-old wife and mother who, when the novel opens, has just received the news that her cancer has recurred. Her husband, Harry, ‘quietly remarkable’, is a solid and comforting presence, determined to fight the invader of his wife’s body with everything at his disposal, while their daughter, Iris, eleven years old and just starting secondary school, swings between affection and anger with dizzying speed. Lia and Iris are close – ‘so close,’ says Lia’s own mother, Anne, ‘I don’t know anything like it’ – and the novel is a paean to their relationship, a tender exploration of impending grief and how to hold on to someone we love even as we have to let them go.

Illness and death are not easy to write about, but Mortimer has adopted a refreshing approach, bouncing her narrative between interior and exterior, past and present, and using language with an exhilarating disregard for convention. In Maps of Our Spectacular Bodies, letters aren’t merely printed on the page – instead, they take on a life of their own. Words abruptly change size and direction, are scattered across the paper like petals, appear as handwriting or inkblots, waves or staircases or slips torn from a notebook. The narrative is fragmentary, with several strands interwoven, and these acrobatics make it even more so, yet in this particular novel such a technique is somehow not distracting. In fact, it would be hard to imagine Maps working quite so well without its bold stylistic decisions.

Part of this is down to Lia – an illustrator who creates children’s books, she is working on an interactive dictionary that allows young readers to supply their own definitions for words. This linguistic playfulness is an important part of her and Iris’s relationship – mother and daughter, though not without their individual flaws, both share a fierce sense of creativity, intelligence and independence – and so helps Lia to come alive on the page, giving us access to her character where perhaps the disjointed nature of the narrative might not. It also has the disconcerting effect of making us warm to that mysterious first-person voice: despite being quite clear about the toll it is taking on Lia’s body, the cancer is irreverent and witty, full of interesting facts and topsy-turvy ways of seeing the human world.

As the novel dances its way along, we learn about Lia’s severely religious upbringing – her father was a priest – and relationship with a mother by whom she felt she was never wanted, which segued into a destructive bond of a different sort with Matthew, a young man taken in by her parents. As long-buried secrets begin to rise to the surface, we are asked to consider how much of our past we carry in and on our bodies, how the maps of our lives are etched into blood and skin and bone. More than just a powerful image, violence is wrought on bodies – a car crash, a mastectomy, sexual assault – but those same bodies are subjected to infinite tenderness, too. Living, barely constrained within the pages of this book, becomes an unashamedly physical act.

Determinedly experimental, Mortimer’s prose is nonetheless perhaps at its finest when it is understated, concerned merely with her characters’ everyday lives and less with linguistic contortions. Likewise, while Lia is the main focus of the narrative, it is eleven-year-old Iris who often seems more subtly drawn – painting her room yellow, enacting small teenage rebellions with her wardrobe choices, administering blisteringly cruel put-downs of her mother followed by apologies so sincere they can barely be voiced. Unshowy, delicately nuanced, these are the moments that make the novel sing, delivering a true sense of poignancy and sustaining our hope that the ending might turn out to be different to the one we expect.

For a novel concerned with dying, Maps of Our Spectacular Bodies is surprisingly celebratory as it careers from one page to the next. Not just a vehicle for storytelling, language becomes a metaphor for life within its pages, bold and unapologetic and true to the unusual path on which it has set itself. This is an impressive debut with a roaring spirit – an emotionally driven story that is fearlessly conveyed and hard to forget.

Maps of Our Spectacular Bodies is published by Picador, 31st March 2022