Review: Body Tourists
Body Tourists by Jane Rogers
My rating: ★★☆☆☆
Blurb:
In this version of London, there is a small, private clinic. Behind its layers of security, procedures are taking place on poor, robust teenagers from northern Estates in exchange for thousands of pounds – procedures that will bring the wealthy dead back to life in these young supple bodies for fourteen days.
It’s an opportunity for wrongs to be righted, for fathers to meet grandsons, for scientists to see their work completed. Old wine in new bottles.
But at what cost?
Review:
[I received a copy through NetGalley, in exchange for an honest review.]
Interesting theme here: dead, wealthy people being brought to life for a couple of weeks in the bodies of fit, but poor youth for whom this is the only hope of making some kind of money.
There’s a lot to be said here in terms of morals and ethics, some on the religious front, and some not. In itself, this is ground for deeper discussion, from the value of money vs. one’s body to whether a human being suddenly “reanimated” in a younger body can be trusted with it or will just do whatever, and not care about their “host”, since they go back to being dead after that anyway. One could even argue that the rich are robbing (shall I say “once again”?) other people of something precious, in this case their time and their youth, and potentially more (this is a bit spoiler-ish, but it happens early enough in the novel anyway). Especially since, in the novel’s near future, the discrepancy between the haves and the have-nots has grown even bigger, with “estates” now being entire towns from which their inhabitants just never escape.
The story explores several of these “body tourists”, from different points of view. There’s Octavia, one of the tourists herself; Luke, the scientist in charge of the project; Paula, a host who then has to go back to her life and the aftermath of this experiment; Rick, who wants to bring back his father; and Elsa, a woman whose partner died after a particularly harrowing event in their lives, leaving so much unsaid. Each narrative highlights a different take on the matter when it comes to reflecting on the whole body swapping angle—whether it’s a valid option, or should be banned altogether, or could work but only within a specific framework.
That said, I had a hard time getting into the story itself, in that these narratives don’t seamlessly join each other. Most of the time, I got the feeling that I was reading a collection of short stories forcefully brought together, rather than a complete story. (And for what it’s worth, perhaps it’s actually how it started, before being turned into a novel.) It doesn’t detract from the philosophical aspect, the concept of body tourism itself, but in terms of storytelling, it was jarring in several places, and because of this, a few parts of the various characters’ stories were also glossed over, when they could’ve been interesting to explore as well.
Conclusion: 2.5 stars. I liked the theme, but the story itself fell flat for me.