The Compound opens with a dreamy, cinematic sequence: a beautiful woman wakes up in a house that is familiar, though she’s never been in it. It’s a sleek but derelict modernist building in the middle of a desert, and looks “like the home of a billionaire, if the billionaire’s staff had gone on strike”. She wanders through the grounds, finding other impossibly beautiful women strewn around like litter. One is asleep by the pool, another is waiting in the garden.
We discover that these women are contestants on a reality TV show. They all know it, but aren’t allowed to admit it, because that might ruin the viewing experience. There are many other rules too. The women wait for 10 men to arrive by foot across the desert. Slowly, those deemed unattractive or unlikeable are eliminated. It’s essentially Love Island with the Orwellian menace amped up.
The narrator, a blonde beauty, introduces herself with creepy detachment: “I’ve always been a passive kind of person; it is both my worst quality and the thing people like most about me.” She insists she is neither intelligent nor interesting, but it’s precisely her blankness and amorality that make her compelling. She is hard to read and easy to underestimate.
Rawle’s narrative is compulsively readable, written with an understated, sharp grace that lets the surreal details shine. From the first page you feel in safe hands, and it’s wonderful to surrender yourself to such a book. As the contestants form alliances, betray each other and attempt small acts of rebellion within the game’s invisible boundaries, the book becomes increasingly addictive. The characters are well observed, and the plot moves with balletic precision towards a bleak and gory finale.
Though marketed as a satire, the political edge is the novel’s least persuasive element. Its critiques of consumerism are broad and familiar; in truth, Love Island functions as a far more layered and unsettling commentary on the world we live in, and it’s not as if viewers are unaware of the show’s dystopian undertones.
The novel’s real power lies elsewhere: in its atmosphere, its pacing and the completeness of Rawle’s narrative control. It’s one of the most engrossing and confidently executed novels I’ve read in a long time.
