I recently attended a book event at which an author who was born in the 1990s spoke of a dubious sense that fiction of her generation was expected to deliver “tidings from the internet” to older readers. I thought of this again as I read Mariel Franklin’s debut novel Bonding, a fast, harsh, smart and fun satire of contemporary tech elites. Thirtysomething Londoner Mary loses her job at a lifestyle app called Healthify and is hired by her ex, Lara, founder of Openr, a dating app. Lara is a gorgeous monster: wealthy, self-serving, dressed in vintage Celine and Saint Laurent. She positions Openr as a disruptor: it takes a progressive attitude to alternative modes of sexuality, from niche fetish to abstinence, and telegraphs a firm ethical position that works to conceal the fact that it exists to capitalise on its “community”. Meanwhile Mary enters, tentatively, into a hot but conventional relationship with a marketing executive, Tom. Tom works on Eudaxa, a novel pharmaceutical medication which is trailed as a pill to end unhappiness.
Bonding is set during Rishi Sunak’s premiership, against a backdrop of social fragmentation and aggression on the streets. It follows the planning and launch of Eudaxa and the nascent intimacy between Mary and Tom. The connection they feel with one another sits uneasily with the stories of sexual liberation and self-determination on which their professional lives are hung. “I think we both wanted out on some ambient level.” Bonding is described on the jacket as a “uniquely modern” story of “our digital age”, marketed with the tagline, “a beach read with big ideas”. That is a lot to ask, but it doesn’t disappoint. The story moves swiftly and delivers fast-flowing takes on data, pharma, ageing, connectivity; what people want, how people love, and how the internet changes everything. It’s pacy but also always analytical. Holding both of those things together feels like an expression of respect for the reader.
At times, Bonding’s hyper-contemporary focus on its apps-and-marketing elite becomes oddly out of touch. This isn’t a flaw of the novel so much as a feature of the narrow community that is its subject. The story of data and its manipulation is relevant beyond Openr and Healthify, but when the characters broach a wider reality in a range of situations, from observations of provincial England to comments on how power or employment work now, the novel loses bite. The provinces – Margate and Luton – are sketchily characterised through Mary’s horrified narrative: vomit puddles, broken windows, violence, racists, and a woman with a “thin, pale face” pushing a pram over smashed glass. The suburbs are brought to life in Tom’s stepmother, who buys Sainsbury’s own-brand products. We are told this twice.
Throughout the book, characters offer swollen generalities on the subject of modernity. In the past, Mary suggests, age “conferred wisdom”, but it is now “synonymous with obsolescence”. Taking this insight seriously requires blinkers or a suspension of belief in much of the world beyond the wellness internet or aspirant startup. Has Mary not heard of the people who are actually in charge of Google, or News Corp, or America? Tom observes that “a stable life” is “no longer enough” for people. “Nowadays you had to reach the top.” King Charles said something similar, 20 years ago. Food bank queues and small boat crossings are just two of the most obvious and grave symptoms of a vast hunger for stability that is apparent almost everywhere.
The issue isn’t that Mary and Tom are young (and white, metropolitan, and middle class), but the assumption that this particular demographic can be appointed to explain modernity. (It makes me wonder where all the gerontocrat novels are – perhaps the people with their hands around our necks are the ones who really have their fingers on the pulse.) Bonding works on its own terms, portraying a confusing and confused swirl of claim and counter-claim that bears comparison with the deadlock described in Jia Tolentino’s 2019 essay collection Trick Mirror: a condition of being simultaneously critical of, and enfolded within, this manipulated digital system that still holds such power, as Franklin shows. Bonding’s finale is, fittingly, both dramatic and analytical, unfolding its author’s vision of how online movements can manifest in violence.
• Bonding by Mariel Franklin is published by Picador (£16.99). To support the Guardian and the Observer buy a copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
