Book Review: The Compound by Aisling Rawle
About the book
You wake up in a compound in the middle of the desert, with nine other women.
All of you are young, beautiful, and keen to escape the catastrophe of the outside world. Cameras broadcast your every move to millions of reality TV fans.
Soon, ten men will arrive on foot – if they survive the journey.
What will you do to win? And what happens to the losers?
Why we love it
Written by Dublin writer, Aisling Rawle, The Compound is an unlikely mash-up of Love Island, Big Brother, The Hunger Games and Lord of the Flies that still somehow manages to feel refreshingly original. It blends the addictive voyeurism of reality TV with the moral ambiguity of dystopian fiction, creating a novel that's as entertaining as it is unsettling.
The story is told from the view point of Lily, a beautiful twenty-something retail assistant who's a contestant on a reality TV show featuring a group of men and women competing for rewards within an isolated desert compound.
Lily isn't your typical heroine. She's not particularly likeable at all, which would normally be enough to put me off a book. Shallow, lazy and materialistic, she's driven by envy and an insatiable desire for things she doesn't have, only to lose interest the moment she gets them. She's frustrating, self-centred and often difficult to root for.
And yet, somehow you still do.
Aisling Rawle does a brilliant job of reminding us that protagonists don't have to be likeable to be compelling. Lily feels real in all her flaws, and before long, you're completely invested in her fate as life within the compound grows ever more brutal.
As readers, we never find out exactly where or when the story takes place. All we know is that the compound is surrounded by unforgiving desert. That somewhere beyond the boundaries, war has been raging for some time with countless lives lost and impacted. That life is hard for many people and catastrophic events, whether natural or man-made, seem to have become part of everyday life. Most of the contestants casually accept the idea that the world could end completely within the next twenty or thirty years.
You can't help but wonder whether the show exists to distract from whatever bleak reality lies beyond the compound's walls, both for the contestants and for the millions of unseen viewers watching at home. And it's impossible not to draw parallels with our current obsession with reality television, influencer culture and with the way entertainment is used to distract us from much larger crises.
For me, this vagueness around the nature of the world outside the compound complimented the storytelling. Yes, it left me with so many unanswered questions at the end of the book, but it also reinforced the otherworldly sense of isolation which the contestants experienced within the compound.
For anyone who enjoys dystopian fiction with sharp social commentary, morally messy characters or thought-provoking stories that leave you questioning what people will do to survive, or even just to stay relevant, The Compound is definitely well worth a read. Thoroughly recommended and exciting debut from a new Irish novelist.
