The Compound

I liked this book a lot. I’m giving it 4 stars because I’m not sure I can fully decipher what it was trying to say, or if it was trying to say anything.

The pitch is “Love Island meets Lord of the Flies”, and that probably about sums it up. Its setting is a realtiy TV show in a very ambiguous future dystopia (there are references to “the wars”, but really we get no detail of the world outside the show).

In a sense maybe it’s a bit of a mess, it’s a satire but it’s not obvious exactly what it’s satirising. There’s an ambient theme of consumerism and late-stage capitalism, but it’s never really a plot point, it’s just there. It doesn’t really make you think so much as make you vaguely uneasy. As an example, the contestants on the show get rewards for completing tasks, and when they get the reward they go to the camera and thank the brand that provided the reward. Nothing else happens about this, and the narrator (whose name is Lilly) doesn’t really reflect on it much either. But it creates this sense of the absurd that contrasts with the darkness of what’s going on between the characters.

The narrator is an interesting point of view as well, because she’s deliberately written as a bit dumb, which isn’t something I’ve encountered before in a first person narrative.

Most of the time all of the internal monologue just relates to the immediate situation in the compound, but there are a small number of times when we get a bit more reflection. There’s a bit I highlighted where Lilly talks about dreading leaving the show and going home, and it ends with:

What did it matter to wake up at the same time every morning and wear the same clothes and try to eat more protein but less sugar, when an earthquake or a tsunami or a bomb might end it all at any minute? Or maybe we would all continue to boil, slowly but surely, in the mess that we pretended was an acceptable place to live.

I loved the writing style: tight pace, not overly flowery, but it had this creeping sense of unease or dread that made me want to keep reading, even when not much was happening. I haven’t read that many thriller type books but I think this is something I really enjoy, when something manages to be a page turner without relying on plot twists or crazy stuff happening all the time.

Didn’t overstay its welcome, the ending was ambiguous and open ended but I thought it was everything it needed to be.

In writing this I’ve very nearly convinced myself to bump it up to five stars. Maybe I’ll come back to this one.