Since the days of Big Brother, reality TV has been a world ripe for extreme behaviour — making it the perfect setting for a thrilling novel about what happens when the experience goes wrong.
Irish author Aisling Rawle describes her debut, The Compound, as “Love Island meets Lord of the Flies” and “Animal Farm — but if everyone was hot and wanted skincare”.
In the opening pages, its protagonist Lily — a young, attractive 20-something — wakes up in a large house surrounded by an expansive desert.
She’s willingly taking part in The Compound, a reality show that sees young men and women couple up and compete for prizes. But from the off, it’s clear that life in the compound will be anything but easy.
There are several striking things about Rawle. One is that she’s so softly-spoken that my recording device barely picks up her voice in the busy cafe, but what she has to say about reality TV, materialism, and social media is deeply wise.
The second is that she’s not a die-hard reality TV fan. The third? She’s not on social media.
Despite this, the 27-year-old Leitrim-born, Dublin-based former English teacher (she’s currently on a break to focus on her writing) is an astute guide to what reality TV can tell us about human behaviour.
The idea for the book emerged during Rawle’s summer break two years ago.
“The first day of the holidays, I woke up with this image in my head, which was the first scene of the novel: two beautiful women, walking around the house and finding the bodies of other beautiful women strewn around like litter,” she says.
“I wrote that scene and then I wrote the rest of it in this mad rush. When it was finished, I knew so little about the publishing industry that I was brazen enough to reach out to an agent and she very kindly took me on.”
The book was written in a six-week “fever dream” and soon multiple publishers were bidding to publish The Compound in Ireland and overseas.
The novel picks apart the “extreme” gender stereotyping across many reality TV shows.
“While the girls are thinking ‘who’s the prettiest in the house?’, the boys are fighting in the desert,” Rawle says of The Compound.
“I think that it is such a cruel aspect of dating shows and reality TV shows — the appearance of women is so scrutinised, and it’s seen as the most important thing. I think we take it for granted.
While watching Love Island during the pandemic, Rawle and her friends started to jokingly describe it as “heterosexual paradise”.
“The heteronormativity is astounding,” she says with a baffled laugh. “It does present the idea not only that the norm is heterosexuality, but that the people worth viewing are heterosexual.”
She examines this in the novel, with readers guessing whether characters are really as straight as they present themselves.
The book is set in the not-too-distant future, and hints at climate issues and ongoing wars.
“We don’t know a whole lot about the outside, but it’s burning and there’s conflict and tension and Lily desperately wants to get away. To me, that didn’t feel very dissimilar to the world today,” says Rawle.
The producers in The Compound come off as manipulative, faceless people who push the participants to do terrible things.
“I wanted to put a little bit of finger-pointing towards the people who create these really toxic situations and pass it off as entertainment,” she says.
As readers, we know the producers have the power, but we recognise that the viewers are culpable too. Rawle watched a lot of Love Island during the covid lockdowns.
“I think that reality television shows normalised having people that we don’t know inside our house as entertainment, which I think probably also paved the way for influencer culture, which I also wanted to criticise a little in this book,” she says.
While she sees influencing as a valid way of making a living, the “transactional nature” of it can feel inauthentic and lead to people second-guessing what is a genuine human interaction or not.
“We all know that social media is fake, and we’ve known that for years, but I think the more it creeps into our lives, the more we’ve normalised that fakeness is the exchange of reality,” she says, adding later with a laugh: “I feel like we’re living in The Truman Show … I feel like that’s just the norm now,” referring to the 1998 film starring Jim Carrey about a man whose entire life is filmed.
She says that with reality television shows, “there is a strange line between entertainment and exploitation”, something that Lily discovers in the house.
In The Compound, the participants know that to win the approval of the producers and viewers they must adhere to certain rules.
These reflect larger societal expectations on people, says Rawle.
Lily is a character who thinks a lot about how people view her, and adjusts herself to meet their expectations. But she also has negative ideas about herself, believing she is stupid.
She sees her worth as being tied up in her looks. Lily’s belief that she is stupid is something Rawle noticed in students: how judgement can have a lasting impact.
The competition in The Compound pits beautiful people against beautiful people, creating a hierarchy of attractiveness.
Lily believes she has to be the most desirable person in the compound, and compares herself to everyone else, “which I think is a horrible way to be”, says Rawle.
The book is written in the first-person so that the reader could potentially “understand Lily’s experience, but also feel removed enough that you would confront your own associations of judgment”.
The book helped Rawle work through some of her own frustrations about the issues she explores in it.
“It was very cathartic,” she says. She never knew what the next scene was going to be, comparing herself to an “evil producer” of the show.
“But I also felt like a viewer of the show going ‘who’s going tonight?’”
The book is underpinned by Rawle’s feminism. Growing up with a younger brother and older sister, she says her teenage feminist awakening was spurred on by books such as Jane Eyre.
More recently, the novel Detransition Baby by transgender writer Torrey Peters further helped her ideas of gender evolve.
Though she once joined Facebook, she isn’t on social media. Why? While she says there is a lot of good on the apps, for her staying focused is a priority. She adds: “It can be a very despairing place, social media.”
This gentle refusal of social media is a sign of how Rawle is able to decide what social norms she does and doesn’t want to take on board.
Part of the book is influenced by her experiences of earning more money after college, and finding that “life revolved around what was the next thing to purchase, which to me didn’t feel like there was a lot of fulfillment or meaning in it”.
The characters in The Compound undertake tasks in order to win expensive items. The tasks can be deeply unpleasant but are seen as worth it because of the result.
As someone in her late 20s, she is part of a generation dealing with multiple stresses, most notably the housing crisis.
She feels extremely lucky to be able to rent on her own, but recalls teaching piano in the evenings while being a teacher by day. “I knew teachers who would go home on the weekend and do carpentry jobs, or personal trainer jobs,” she says.
Excitingly for an Irish author, The Compound is being published in America and was recently chosen for the Good Morning America book club for July.
Rawle remains sanguine: “The book was the success for me. Everything else was secondary.”
While The Compound does end at a moment that’s a good jumping-off point for a sequel, Rawle’s next book is about something totally unrelated.
“It’s funny, the protagonist of the next book is very superstitious, and I’ve become superstitious — so I’m reluctant to say too much,” she offers.
It’s an exciting time for Rawle, but she seems well capable of dealing with the whirlwind of publishing a book on both sides of the Atlantic. All that’s left is to ask the burning question: would she ever go on a reality show herself?
“It’s a definite no,” she says, laughing. “You couldn’t pay me enough!”
- The Compound by Aisling Rawle, published by Harper Collins, is out now
