Bonding, Mariel Franklin’s debut fiction novel, paints a reality we haven’t quite owned up to yet. Franklin observes that because of dating and hookup apps, we have become better opportunists, better stalkers, better at getting what we want out of each other – masters, or at least apprentices, of the dark arts. The optics around apps like Feeld and Hinge point to equity and mutual respect and to none of the machiavellianism they tease out of us. Franklin writes the characters in Bonding – who pinball between familiar-sounding kink apps like Openr and the experimental over-the-counter drug Eudaxia – in brutally economic prose, as if she is taking notes at the scene of a crime. In person, Franklin is amazed by our new stalking society, and it’s her stone-cold pen – and observations of adult technocrats just… technologising – that gives Bonding its strange time signature. If the narrator of Less Than Zero was numb from the drugs and lasers of 1980s Los Angeles, Bonding’s is catatonic on the buzz of digital interference.
Like Bonding’s London protagonist Mary, Franklin worked as a data manager; the kind of metropolitan office spy you see in Clerkenwell media agencies and politics, in characters like Dominic Cummings and Lynton Crosby. A quarter way through the 21st century, offices up and down every major metropolis hire modern-day spooks to drain the internet of personal material, and it got Franklin thinking of the ways the information age has normalised behaviour we might have once labelled taboo or off-limits. After losing her job, Mary meets Tom, a pharmaceutical chemist developing an antidepressant designed to calm the sorrows of an oversubscribed generation. The two start dating and dither through gestures of light psychological warfare, each aware that the other knows more about them than they are letting on. Mary’s boss and ex Lara runs Openr, and as the two reunite, revive a power struggle the protagonist had shut away.
As with many firsts – first album, first drawing, directorial debut – Bonding is an outpouring of ideas, ideology and autobiography. Like Mary, Franklin has always felt slightly discordant to the circles she worked and studied in formatively (she’d break away from buttoned-up Goldsmiths crowds to watch video nasties in an ex-old people’s home her friend’s parents owned, in her early 20s). But it’s the distance she affords Mary, from the strange scenes unfurling in front of her and the wasteland it is making of her mind, that leaves the reader room for questions. “Nothing is shocking anymore,” Franklin says. “You’ve got to ask why.”
Many people want art to reflect their lives, and others want them to shake them out of it, to question accepted ways of being. What do you want from art, and what do you want it to do to you?
I was a really early reader, and was a bit compulsive about it. I read a lot of detective stories and sci fi and all kinds of borderline-interesting fiction. At Goldsmiths, I started writing a bit more in earnest. To be honest, outside of the obvious literary influences, I was probably more influenced by film and music. I met Adam Curtis through friends in the Lux art film network, he was a big influence. Everything was moving-image – it was big at that time, around 2010-ish, and he became a bit of a mentor figure I think. I wasn’t really interested in video art, especially at that point, it was kind of that post-net Jon Rafman moment, which still hasn’t really been replaced. I just liked the freedom with which (Curtis) pulled (aspects of popular culture) together. It feels very kind of intuitive; he’s not really interested in genre or formats. It’s almost like a piece of music. There’s enough space in it for a little bit of improvisation and to allow the elements to do their thing with each other and see what happens. I guess there’re early, early writers that were doing things like that in the 1960s and 70s. There was so much film at that time, YouTube was blowing up as well, and also lots of really extreme gore online and ISIS had just released their first videos. Film just felt very visceral – that kind of film, as opposed to whatever was on in the cinema. I never really got on with Spotify, but I did listen to stuff on SoundCloud a lot. I think that kind of feed recommendation system makes you listen in a different way. I got into a lot of sad internet music, a Oneohtrix Point Never kind of zone.
These days I’m slowly working my way through the classics, and I think I came full circle, actually, because the book came out of lots of notes I had written under my table at work. I wanted to write something that felt fairly classical, like a real novel, because I felt like it needed some architecture. Sometimes, when you get too deranged (writing a novel), you want to pull it back again.
Tell me about the culture at Goldsmiths, and how it found its way into Bonding.
I massively underestimated how much money you need to do an MFA, and then get into the right galleries and all of that stuff. I just think contemporary art has a whole different culture on the continent because it’s so well funded. It’s a whole other world. So in that sense, I didn’t really take it as seriously as everyone else did. I think I was a bit more black-pilled about the whole thing – the art market and the way the system works, and the money and the class, (the class aspects of it have probably tightened up since then, because London’s become so much more expensive). I definitely read a lot more than them, more conventional literature. I was probably a bit more of a pervert than them too, to be honest. I had a friend growing up whose parents owned an old people’s home, so we would have the top floor of the house to play in, and there was nothing to do. We discovered that the local market had a man selling DVDs. We were just looking for something a little bit transgressive or interesting or fun that our parents wouldn’t really know we were watching. (They probably thought we were going off to buy comedies or whatnot.) I remember watching Zabriskie Point by Antonioni, Argento, and Lars von Trier. I love Michael Haneke – I remember seeing Funny Games, which had a big impact on me. I think the people I was at college with had also seen those films, but they are probably much more canonical in their countries, and had watched them much later as undergrads. Whereas I came in through a really weird side door and was a bit hardened from them. I’d also worked and had had a day job for most of my life, which none of them had.
Your dalliance with data management seems to allow you some healthy distance from the art space, too.
I started temping, just doing kind of admin, and then I realized I could start calling myself a data manager. In those days, there wasn’t so much red tape around the whole thing, and it would pay a lot more. Then once I finished college, I just needed to live. So that was another big point of difference, because most of (my fellow Goldsmiths students) weren’t really having to have a parallel life. When you’re behind the dashboard, you know the whole business model is about looking for patterns, trends. It’s all about predictive power, obviously, because whether you’re trying to target a marketing campaign or a drone strike, it’s essentially the same thing. But I think because of the nature of the platform, that ability to really stratify what would have been considered the mainstream, you could really see all the different layers. You could really break it down. I mean, it’s not an original observation, but it’s quite surreal when you can really see that, oh, this niche really does behave like this. There is something in the idea that you could steer people this way or that way.
There’s a detached quality to the writing that winks at the absurdity of the tech classes, at applications trying to automate our private and interior lives. It’s a subtle dryness, a faint laugh heard in the distance. Did you intend for this? How did you settle on a tone?
Nothing is shocking at this point, despite this arms race we have for transgression online, where, y’know, your granny has probably seen the worst porn you can imagine. So that doesn’t really leave much space for writing something so extreme it shocks people out of their mundane routines and enable them to see society anew. I’m not sure that space really exists anymore. From my point of view, the online media environment is so all encompassing – it’s trying to get as close to you as it can – that I think humor is a way of creating a bit of distance from it. I think that’s one way you can develop some immunity, by being able to laugh at it. A lot of these internet trends and ‘moments’ date so quickly now that they seem insane a year or two later. And the other thing – and maybe this feeds into wanting to try to write something that felt like a fairly traditional kind of borderline-existentialist novel – is that all you can do is broaden your perspective, and that in itself is a distancing maneuver. It gives you a moment of hesitation before being dragged into the sensation of that moment – whatever it is that’s attracting you, or whatever status game you’re playing. It’s about trying to write honestly about the experience of being in it and then finding ways to zoom out enough to create enough distance to discuss it.
“I don’t anyone would publish something like American Psycho now, which is weird, because the world we live in has a billion versions of it online, and everyone’s looking at it constantly“ – Mariel Franklin
I was reading a lot of Old French existentialist stuff at the time (of writing) – Celine’s Journey to The End of The Night, that kind of thing from around the world wars. I think they struck that tone – slightly blank, slightly detached – because they were trying to examine the material. It’s arbitrary, really – a lot of it is also kind of instinctive. I never sat down and thought, I’m gonna write a book in the style of Celine. That would be ridiculous. I also liked ‘Things’ by Jack Parekh, another quite glacial, flat book that is actually quite emotive, really. It’s a trick, I guess. Like all art, there’s an element of sleight of hand that you have to accept, but I think that chaos and form aren’t necessarily in conflict. It’s like a sad song with a happy melody; in some ways, it makes a song even sadder. I guess that’s the way I thought about making the balance work.
I really wanted to make something that didn’t feel desirable in the way that most cultural artifacts do. I watched a lot of John Waters films when I was writing this. He’s a bit like Warhol, but there’s nothing cool about it; it’s Warhol on mushrooms, instead of speed, something like that. It’s funny, and it’s not ashamed of being ridiculous. I’m quite interested in the idea of things just being incredibly uncool. I wanted to wipe away that instinct to strike a pose and to make something that just feels very of its moment, something that will be gone again (soon). We’re all caught in that, and it’s accelerating by the day, and I guess that was another reason why I wrote it in a slightly old fashioned, flat way.
A large part of what the book is saying is that perversion and spying have always been a part of love, sex and dating, but these traits are now being outsourced to third parties. The tools to manipulate have become sharper, and have made us all better daters.
I think people are talking more about their “online journey” you could call it. I think there is more discussion about, oh, how did I end up down this weird filter hole, and why do I now think this thing? And, oh, a year later, I’m now at the opposite end of the political spectrum, or I’m chasing some hype cycle that I’ve never heard of back then. I think Zoomers are a little bit more interested in talking about what’s going on and almost historicising it. And I think that’s a really good thing, actually, because I think that also gives you a certain level of defence, so you’re not just easy prey for whoever’s trying to make a few quid off of whatever niche you’ve fallen into. I probably should be using social media to promote this book, but actually, I don’t. I’m a bit of a lurker still.
I’ve got friends who text almost like they’re posting at me, and there’s really no expectation of a reply. It’s just there. Maybe we’ll pick it up at some point. And then there are people who are much closer to it, like it’s an instant chat, and it’s unspoken. I know that I can’t leave them on read, I don’t even know why. And then it gets into the surreal – maybe we’ll just send each other a weird GIF or a meme, and it’s understood maybe, or maybe not. So tonally, I also wanted to at least scratch the surface of that, because I don’t think it’s really been done very well in literature, and I don’t think we were even really aware of it. We live in such a text-based world still, despite all the images we see online.
“I really wanted to make something that didn’t feel desirable in the way that most cultural artifacts do“ – Mariel Franklin
Mary explores her sexual and societal transgressions – how hard were these areas to write, and how much further descriptively had you wished you had been able to go if you knew no one would read it?
I didn’t think anyone would publish this. It was written very fast and kind of scrappily, and I think it shows. So I kind of thought, I’m just going to be punk rock and go as far as I can (with it). And then the draft that I submitted when I got an agent was pulled back quite a lot, to be honest – I just thought, no one’s got to publish this as it is, and she kind of agreed with me, but I don’t know if that was the right thing to do. I think maybe next time I’ll go a little bit further. It was a bit darker and more X-rated. I find it weird, actually, because a lot of novels that do get published now do feel a lot softer and more sanitised than things that got published pre-millennium. I reread American Psycho recently – it’s quite harsh, really. I don’t think it would have got published now like that, which is weird, because the world we live in has a billion versions of that all day long (online), and everyone’s looking at it constantly.
Your work-in-progress follow-up is a mystery set in the world of London academia – can you reveal anything about the plot, what it might signal? And do you have a favourite fictional detective?
It’s about mathematicians. It’s a thriller set in a university that’s kind of inspired by Imperial College, because Imperial College recently overtook Oxford and Cambridge in the world rankings. But because they don’t get legacy donations, they have to fund themselves by public or private partnerships and corporate sponsorships. It’s a STEM University as well, they don’t really cover the humanities. So it’s kind of a whole new model. I wanted to write something that’s about what it’s like to work in these departments. My brother’s an academic, and I, at one point, thought I wanted to be one, so I spent a bit of time working in universities. I just think it’s really interesting, the way it’s going. I also think it’s interesting that after the great push to get kids into STEM, it turns out language is at the forefront of all the machine learning models, not just the language models. Language is a model of the world as much as any numerical model, and in fact, it’s more sophisticated in some ways. But it’s also a mystery about a missing girl. It came out of conversations with some academics I know, and my job working with a really early learning model. They have takes that I wouldn’t necessarily have thought of: it’s quite fertile ground.
I read lots of detective fiction. I even like the real kind of trashy Tesco Isle stuff, whodunnits and life swap stories. And obviously Hitchcock – that era probably hasn’t really been topped. The difficulty is finding a new angle on it, because it’s so populated as a genre. I’ve probably read most of the big, famous detective writers on both sides of the Atlantic. I love Patricia Highsmith, and her kind of blue stocking, slightly lesbian feel. I like a good campus mystery. I also think the detective story is a good model because it’s about finding things out. Obviously, this whole endeavour is about how much we can find out, what we can know.
Bonding is out now via FSG
