In her debut novel, Maps of Our Spectacular Bodies, Maddie Mortimer has spun a narrative both corporeal and metaphysical in nature, that exposes the complex nature of human relationships with both other humans and the world around us. The novel centers on Lia, a mother who’s been diagnosed with terminal breast cancer, and her daughter Iris—who struggles to understand her mother’s illness and the effects it has on her life. The novel toggles back and forth between Lia’s present as a dying woman—and her troubling past, where Mortimer slowly reveals the difficult life that Lia had as a young child growing up in a countryside vicarage with a pious father and withholding mother.
But the novel is also narrated in short bursts by another figure, a not quite human pseudo-spirit figure that has been present throughout Lia’s life. It’s not exactly a voice in Lia’s head, but more of an entity that both observes Lia from the outside but also from within, as the figure becomes increasingly integrated into Lia’s body as the narrative progresses. The narration in these chapters is formally quite different from the straight third person narration that comprises the rest of the novel: the spirit narrates in bold type, uses a more free flowing lyric, and has an very physical presence characterized by sound, smell, and touch.
It would be easy to name the spirit as a sort of anthropomorphized voice for Lia’s cancer, but I think its more complicated than that. The spirit has been with Lia throughout her whole life, and it feels more to me like a manifestation of Lia’s repressed upbringing in a faith-obsessed household—where despite appearances, mortal sin was seeping through the walls.
While the center of the novel is Lia’s relationship with her daughter Iris, Mortimer plays this strong and intimate bond off of Lia’s own relationship with her mother, who is very cold and distant. The ways in which Lia’s mom has failed her throughout her life become clear, which only underscores the complex nature of mother-daughter bonds. The novel is not only haunted by the spirit narrator, but also by a human character who becomes central to Lia’s story. Matthew is a parentless young boy who comes to the vicarage when Lia is a childhood, who her parents foster as their own child and raise to be a preacher. Matthew becomes a central force in Lia’s life, and their tumultuous relationship over the years shapes Lia into the woman she has become in a variety of ways.
The Booker Prize judges panel, which longlisted this novel for the prize (along with many other excellent debuts), said of the book: “Deliriously inventive and viscerally moving, Mortimer’s debut is a patterned, protean narrative that astonishes and overwhelms. Lia is dying while she’s living, her past, present and future a glorious cacophony of voices, from the webs of words that bind her to her daughter, to the mutating cancer that is an inexorable part of her self.” I think that sums it up fairly well! This polyphonic and inventive narrative is an incredibly promising debut, one which catapults Mortimer to the forefront of the literary landscape globally.