Book: The Bodybuilders
Author: Albertine Clarke
Publication: Bloomsbury
Price: $26.99
When Emily Brontë wrote, “Whatever souls are made of, his and mine are the same,” in Wuthering Heights, she may have perceived the sentiment to be the most human: to have one’s soul mirror another’s, or to be created with the same ingredients or in the same way as another person. However, The Body Builders takes this profound ideal of spiritual unity and distorts it. In this narrative, the “materials” are no longer metaphysical; they are replaced by the chemical and the physical.
Ada, the protagonist, carries an early, unsettling awareness that she is fundamentally different. This internal isolation is mirrored in her external world: her parents are divorced, and she navigates a fractured, unstable relationship with both of them. One day, she finds Atticus, a man whom she recognises to be the same person as her: “...she only had to catch sight of the back of his head to know that a mistake had been made, and he was who she was really supposed to be.”
Despite this recognition, her adulthood relationships — with Francesca, Patrick and even Atticus — do not define her in the least. If anything, they make her even more aware of her loneliness. This loneliness manifests itself as Ada is taken to a different world, one where she is the source of her own surroundings, not the other way around. Her ideas of self, love and reality get flipped in this place, which lingers somewhere between her mind and her body.
The title of the novel not only serves as a metaphor for the characters’ desperate attempts to construct an identity when their internal worlds have crumbled but also defines the ”facility” where bodies are literally made and swapped for synthetic copies.
As the physical world becomes increasingly artificial, Ada’s dreams become her only true anchor to her thoughts, even as they pull her further from the shore of reality. While Ada can barely distinguish her dreams from actual hallucinations or astral projections, it is in them that she feels the most connected to Atticus, and often to herself.
The novel leaves the reader deeply uneasy as the haunting atmosphere offers no reprieve from Ada’s constant deterioration. It is an unsettling journey with no final resolution; her real self remains permanently separated from the synthetic version that ultimately steps into her life and takes her place.