The Body Builders, Albertine Clarke (Bloomsbury 978-1-639-73713-0, $26.99, 228pp, hc) March 2026.
The strangeness in Albertine Clarke’s first novel The Body Builders comes from the honourable strategy of taking a real-life scenario and recasting it in science fictional terms to create a kind of double vision, in which what the protagonist, Ada, describes and perceives may or may not be the same as what is actually happening. Clarke’s acknowledged influences are Philip K. Dick and Kurt Vonnegut; the cool clarity of her prose and the Englishness of her setting also made me think a little of Christopher Priest, if Priest had ever written about a contemporary twentysomething woman struggling with emotional alienation and a degree of body dysmorphia. So The Body Builders is a novel in which Ada, an aspiring writer who is drawn to science fiction but (owing to a lack of interest in this from her peers) is in fact writing a novel about her parents’ divorce. She has situationships with an older writer, Atticus, and a younger one, Patrick, and then goes on holiday with her mother to Greece, where she has a kind of breakdown in the face of her mother’s poised, detached persona. And at the same time it is a novel in which Ada and Atticus are versions of the same consciousness placed in different bodies by alien Others from a realm of thought, who try to fix their mistake by giving Ada a new and wholly synthetic body that has the effect not only of cutting off her entanglement with Atticus, but of isolating her from the rest of humanity, leading to the aforementioned breakdown. The two frames are deftly overlapped for the duration of the short, insistent novel.
I found myself highlighting a lot of phrases that seemed to land with extra weight. As early as page six, primed to expect something strange, a sentence like “At first she thought the voice had come out of the radio, but then she realized it was inside her head, as if somebody had put it there” felt like a signal, a clue. Ada tells us that she feels like “an object in the shape of a person”; in an intimate moment, she senses that “whatever was supposed to regulate her internal stasis had failed.” She thinks of herself and Atticus as “two identical objects from the same manufacturer,” so that when he drops the older-man cliché, “I feel like I’ve known you for a long time,” I felt a genuine hesitance about whether he was reporting a typical delusion or a real perception, and when Ada responds by thinking that “It was the first time in her life, she felt, that she could be sure of her own existence,” it seemed true twice over. The anxiety and uncertainty, but also the thrill, of being embodied young and embodied as a woman, are palpable. Just occasionally I wondered whether there was a missed change to talk about embodiment in a more complete sense, beyond only youth and gender; but that hesitation aside, what we get is a series of potent moments in which an on-the-face-of-it mundane experience feels suffused with something more, and then every so often, that potential sharpens into an arrow that points back from something more into the mundane. Waiting in the accident and emergency department of a hospital, Ada thinks, “She didn’t like to think of herself as a body. People became bodies when there was something wrong with them.” By this point we have read enough to have a strong suspicion that something may “really” be “wrong” with Ada’s body, that is, something may be science fictionally different about it: But I at least also felt, very sharply, that this fearful reaction came from whatever part of Ada is most human.
I have read novels in which this sort of dance quickly became tedious, and I have read novels in which it is compelling: I would put The Body Builders in the latter category. Partly this is a matter of length. The novel is no longer than it needs to be, with clear purpose and disciplined execution. Partly it is because it pays off: The last third of the novel, following Ada’s breakdown, reverses the balance of the mundane and the speculative, changing the nature of the dance. Partly, I think, perhaps shamefully, it is the voyeuristic hint of autofiction. Clarke has spoken in interviews about some elements of Ada’s experience having roots in her own, particularly the parental relationships, a knowledge that acquires an additional frisson when you learn that her mother is the writer Rachel Cusk, celebrated not only for her cool airtight autofictional novels, but for her unsparing autobiographical non-fiction about motherhood and divorce. But I hope, in the end, I am being honest when I say the largest part of my enjoyment of The Body Builders came from the simple pleasure of encountering the first outing of a fresh and skillful voice, one that has an understanding of SF as both tool and project, and as a route to estranging the society we have allowed to happen around us. I’m curious and optimistic about what Albertine Clark might write next.
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