Around a third of the way through Bodies, the debut novel from Christine Anne Foley, the book moves away from its realist literary opening into something approaching horror. It’s quite the genre switch, for this reader at least, and until I’d figured out what was going on, the material events of the novel seemed, in a word, ludicrous.
But taken as a slippery, shape-shifting story about the indignities of modern dating for girls and women, a kind of deranged Bildungsroman, it ends up being a lot of fun.
Foley has important things to say about the mistreatment of women by men over a period spanning the early noughties to contemporary times, as experienced by her protagonist Charlotte Murphy, a young woman from Kilkenny whose older sister died in tragic circumstances. At its best, Bodies is a study in debasement, a searing portrait of boys and men who treat women like playthings, all of it worn remarkably lightly, in a book you could easily take to the beach.
Questions around ownership of the female body are central to the various narrative strains, with Foley showing how little it takes, in this age of smartphones and Snapchat, for the private, the deeply personal, to become suddenly, grotesquely public. A mix of first-person and second-person voices creates a notable intimacy, recalling books like Susannah Dickey’s Tennis Lessons and Caroline O’Donoghue’s Promising Young Women. Another Promising Young Woman, the film by Emerald Fennell starring Carey Mulligan, also comes to mind.
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Foley grew up in Graignamanagh in Kilkenny. She studied English at Trinity and has a masters in creative writing from Oxford University. Her work has appeared in the literary journals Skirting Around, Neurological and Sonder Magazine. The intimate voice of Bodies drops us straight into Charlotte’s world as Foley charts the journey from teenage shenanigans to Tinder: “It felt like one day I was covering my mouth and laughing at boys’ advances and the next I was straddling a boy in his apartment in Mountjoy Square. And that’s how it happened. In my mind.”
This same bracing tone is useful in depicting the male characters, the observational gaze neatly reversed. Of the gangs of boys around her hometown of Coolfarnamanagh (a fictionalised name that proves distracting), Charlotte notes: “They walked past us laughing and pushing each other in that childish, boyish way that always annoyed me.”
Her various boyfriends and liaisons over a 15-year period – Johnny, Lar, Dave, Kyle, Adam – all pale, we are told, in comparison to a more recent boyfriend, known only as You: “And you were normal. I’d received no unsolicited dick pics. I knew about your family: two brothers, older; a sister, younger. But I didn’t know any unnecessary family scandal. You hadn’t unloaded your childhood trauma on me, unlike the men I’d met on the apps, the men who used women they met online like some free therapist.”
The timeline of the narrative – teenage life, college life, teaching in Dublin – is not complicated, but Foley loops back on events and relationships in a way that occasionally confuses. Though the side characters are well drawn, best mates blend into flatmates into workmates in the chaotic structure. Charlotte’s relationship with You needs more time on the page; the action of their four years together is mostly related, mostly opinion, which is a shame as the few scenes that feature You – a rammed Dublin pub after a GAA match; a morning after with a difference – are vivid and convincing.
The perfectly adequate prose style of the first half tends towards hyperbole as the story progresses: “What you did felt loud and noisy, it broke the silence that cocooned us. You spoke the words and they were a gristly sinew getting caught in your teeth and the flesh of them rotted in your mouth and your breath was sour as you breathed on me and it made my eyes water and my stomach churn.” The melodramatic language doesn’t suit the subject matter, which is by its nature dramatic enough.
Far better are the bright, tactile images that Foley uses to show desire in the early stages of relationships, “how he’d touched the small of my back with a lightness that could lift me”. She writes sex very well, which is no easy feat, getting the reader close to the action, sometimes unbearably so depending on Charlotte’s choice of partner.
Bodies is a story with plenty of gore, sustained by the author’s insights and her quick sense of humour. Echoing so many bad dates everywhere of the Tinder generation, she asks, winking: “Is there a word for pre-emptive regret?” Bodies is not your typical beach read, but it will no doubt get people talking this summer.
