Maps of Our Spectacular Bodies by Maddie Mortimer review: a novel narrated by cancer

“Today I might trace the rungs of her larynx or tap at her trachea like the bones of a xylophone or cook up or undo some great horrors of my own because here is the thing about bodies: they are impossibly easy to prowl, without anyone suspecting a thing.”

Who or what is narrating the first page of Maddie Mortimer’s debut novel, Maps of Our Spectacular Bodies, longlisted for this year’s Booker Prize, isn’t immediately clear. Or not until we slip back out of the central protagonist Lia’s viscera, and find her en route to the hospital where the doctor breaks the bad news: her cancer is back.

A novel about a dying woman that is part narrated by both the disease that is killing her and the chemotherapy that is her only chance of survival isn’t going to be everyone’s cup of tea, but hear me out. Mortimer’s debut is actually a lot less experimental than it sounds, and it is also much more compelling and uplifting that one might expect.

Lia is a 43-year-old children’s book illustrator, her husband Harry is an academic, and they live in London with their 11-year-old daughter Iris. Lia’s diagnosis ruptures the family’s happy but resolutely routine existence – how could it be any other way? – but so too the rhythms of everyday life hum on regardless. Iris goes to school, where she finds herself up against a classroom bully. Harry has to keep going to work, even when he feels as if “all the usual latches that kept his consciousness within his body had lifted”. Lia, meanwhile, has to juggle the side effects of her chemo alongside the day-to-day demands of motherhood in “this act of pulling days out from one’s sleeve”.

As time marches forward, the seasons change and Lia’s outlook becomes bleaker, Mortimer also unspools backwards through her protagonist’s life story. Her father was a vicar, but it is her mother’s faith – a “huge, inscrutable” thing with a life of its own – that sucked up all the oxygen in their home: “It entered rooms before she did, often announcing her arrival, and then obstructing everyone else from moving about.”

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.

Lia’s mother buys a book about cancer, which she then struggles to read as it is too advanced for her, meant instead for students of science. “But she was trying, at least,” she thinks, “trying to understand what was happening to her daughter’s body.” Maps of Our Spectacular Bodies is Mortimer’s own attempt to try to understand what happens to an ailing, invaded body; to make some narrative sense out of an otherwise illogical, shattering experience. The novel is dedicated to her own mother, the television producer and writer Katie Pearson, who died of cancer in 2010.

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).

Mortimer is the latest in a more recent wave of writers experimenting with different ways of expressing embodied experience on the page: think of Natasha Brown, Eimear McBride, Max Porter and Rebecca Watson. More cohesive than Watson’s fragmented tale of sexual violence, Little Scratch, and less allusively poetic than Porter’s The Death of Francis Bacon, Maps of Our Spectacular Bodies sits somewhere in between. It certainly has its more radically creative moments, especially as Lia gets sicker – words in particular shapes (a star, a dove, a series of concentric circles); sentences that trip and tumble down the page; clashes in font; a double page spread on which a single word is printed over and over again – but this is method over madness.

For all its rich agility, I am not sure it has quite got the polish to make it on to the Booker shortlist, but who knows. As a first novel, it is undeniably impressive: Mortimer is clearly a talent to watch.

Maps of our Spectacular Bodies is published by Picador at £14.99. To order your copy for £12.99 call 0844 871 1514 or visit Telegraph Books