The Compound

by Aisling Rawle ★★★☆☆

The Compound opens with our narrator, Lily, waking up in the titular location, a remote home in the middle of the desert in some indeterminate location. We learn quickly that she is part of a reality television show, something that resembles Bachelor Pad or Love Island, perhaps crossed with Survivor. The girls are all in the house—ten in total— and they are waiting for the arrival of the boys, who will be walking in from the desert at some point in the near future. Interestingly the house is not a bucolic paradise, but instead is in a state of fairly significant disrepair. It's filthy, missing most furniture outside of beds, and devoid of most basic amenities. We soon learn that all of that is able to be earned in the game.

There are some standard rules of how the contestants must comport themselves while on the show:

"The first was that it was forbidden to discuss that the show was in fact a show, or that we had seen the show before. It ruined the experience for the viewer and the participants, we had been told. The second was that we couldn’t discuss our life outside of the compound unless we had been instructed to do so. The third was that it was forbidden to harm another resident. There were other rules, but they wouldn’t come into effect until the boys arrived. We all understood that if we broke any of these rules we would be punished."

The rules of elimination are fairly simple: "you stayed in the compound only if you woke in the morning next to someone of the opposite sex. If you slept alone, you would be gone by sunrise." Contestants can also be eliminated through tasks / competitions on the show.

Once the boys arrive, the game starts in earnest. The contestants are presented tasks, both as a group and individually. The group tasks must be completed by everyone still in the compound in order to earn a prize—typically an item of necessity for the compound— or eliminate a cast member, while the individual tasks usually earn a luxury item for the person, who is forbidden from discussing the task. "For example, last year a girl had been instructed to kiss a boy who had been interested in her for weeks. He was delighted, and thought it was the beginning of a romance between them. Everyone watching had gone crazy for it because we knew that the kiss was only so that the girl could earn a hair dryer."

Today's reality television shows shine a light on some of the basest and materialistic behavior in our society, but The Compound amps things up to another level. The contestants are almost universally self-centered and wholly driven by earning prizes, with narrator Lily leading the way. "Within minutes of speaking to the girls, I knew that I was one of the most beautiful, and one of the least interesting," Lily tells us. "And who wants to work anyway? If you make it to the end here, you can have whatever you want, and you don't have to deal with all the other bullshit...I don’t have any real talent. I’m pretty, but not the prettiest. I’m not smart. I’ll never have a better opportunity than this." She's vapid, singularly focused on winning, and wholly unlikable.

And speaking of unlikable, nearly everyone in the book fits a version of the same mold, which is the point, I suppose. It's a sad treatise on the materialistic direction our society continues to head in, exacerbated by social media and influencers and the way we have rewarded that type of behavior. The first line of debut author Aisling Rawle's bio notes that she was born in 1998, and her defeatist Gen Z take is even more depressing because it's rooted in her lived reality. As she says in the acknowledgements, "thanks to my 2023–24 TY High School class for your enthusiastic and stimulating conversations on consumerism and late-stage capitalism which helped to form some of the central ideas of this book." It's a rough time to be part of Gen Z, and the novel's tone reflects that overall malaise and disappointment.

It's an interesting read and creatively compiled, but not an enjoyable one, given it's hard to root for anyone in the book. As the stakes get higher and the contestants get more desperate, their basest behaviors start to shine through even more glaringly, giving me ever-increasing reasons to dislike them. I couldn't help but feel increasing levels of pity and disgust for nearly all of the contestants. I want someone to root for in a book, especially one like this where there is ostensibly a "winner" in the end, and in this case, I was rooting against them all.

The result is a story that resembles Lord of the Flies, but for influencers, where it's not survival of the fittest, but survival of the most self-centered and materialistic. It's an interesting and dark exploration of modern society, and one that I will be thinking about for a while, even if I won't be universally recommending it.

By contrast, I'd suggest Chain-Gang All-Stars by Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah. There are some related themes—it's centered around a near-future society absorbed in a reality television event—but in this case, that reality show focuses on prisoners fighting to the death in scheduled gladiatorial matches while being filmed 24x7 the remainder of the time. And it's so good. Check that one out instead if you're looking for harsh societal commentary as told through the lens of a reality television show.