The Compound by Aisling Rawle
A Novel
Title: The Compound
Author: Aisling Rawle
Publisher: Random House
Publication Year: 2025
ISBN: 9780593977279
Rating: 4 stars
I got an ARC of this title as part of the Employee Ambassador Program, but this book comes out next week, so it should be available at your local bookstore or library for you soon if you’re interested.
Louise O’Neill, an author who blurbed this book, described it as “Love Island meets Lord of the Flies,” and that instantly caught my attention. I am ashamed to admit that I watched the first two seasons of Rock of Love with Bret Michaels in the mid-aughts, and my sister got me into season eight of Love is Blind earlier this year, but I don’t watch a lot of reality TV and I haven’t seen Love Island. I did have to go read the Wikipedia page for Love Island and it does seem that the format of the show inspired the reality TV show in the book.
This book follows Lily—a young woman who is beautiful, but without much intellectual substance, who is bored of her life and has no hope for her future prospects in the seemingly dystopian world she lives in. She sees her only opportunity coming from her chance to go on a popular reality TV show that remains unnamed throughout the book.
The show starts with ten “girls” waking up in a remote desert compound. There are also ten “boys” who wake up in the surrounding desert and must make their way to the compound. In the following weeks and months, the contestants must live and work together. They are given group tasks through a big screen in their living room and for every task they complete, they are given a reward of something they want or need to maintain their lives on the compound. If they do not complete a task in the space of a day, the task and the reward disappear to be replaced with a new task the next day. Every time a task is completed, a new one appears, so the rewards are limited only to how much the contestants are willing or able to do in a day.
In addition to the big screen giving communal tasks, each contestant has a small screen that gives them personal tasks that they can do to win individual rewards. The rewards are often geared toward what they want or need, but one of the rules is that they cannot tell the other contestants when they are doing a personal task or what they have done to earn their personal rewards. This means that the other contestants can never be sure when someone is acting out of genuine desire or when they are simply completing a task.
In order to remain on the compound, each contestant must spend the night with a member of the opposite sex. If a contestant sleeps alone or spends the night with a member of the same sex, they are banished from the compound at sunrise the next morning. Banishing contestants is also sometimes an assigned communal task and people are allowed to leave whenever they want, leading to the number of contestants to dip. Other rules include that contestants cannot refer to being on the show, cannot talk about their lives outside of the show, cannot get into physical altercations, and must thank their sponsors for all rewards they receive on the show. When they leave the show, they can only take what they can carry and must walk out into the desert to be picked up by producers.
When the contestants are down to the final five, the rules change. They no longer have to spend the nights together, they can talk about their personal lives, and they can fight. The rewards are bigger and better, but instead of communal tasks, the big screen offers communal challenges, the loser of which is banished from the commune. When the show is down to the final contestant, the winner, they are allowed to stay in the compound as long as they’d like. They no longer have to do tasks for rewards, they simply have to ask for what they want and they receive it. To Lily, who works at a department store makeup counter and has no real marketable skills or hobbies in her personal life, living on the compound in material wealth seems like a dream. She enters the show determined to win and to stay in the compound for as long as possible.
For Lily’s season, the drama starts almost immediately when it takes the boys longer than usual to arrive at the compound. When they arrive, only nine were able to make the journey so a girl is up for elimination immediately. Lily soon realizes that the compound isn’t the break from the real world she thought it would be. There are plenty of people just as determined as she is to win and the viewers and other contestants quickly start to see her as “useless” as she feels in the real world. Having viewer support is a boon on the show, so the chips are already stacked against her.
As Lily tries to continue to hang in there, she experiences friendships, love, and menace, and soon has to start scheming to gain an advantage she is lacking. However, as she continues to play the game, Lily starts to question whether the material comfort is worth it. When power factions start to break out and take over the compound, she has to decide how she is going to align herself to her best advantage and just how far she is willing to go to win.
One of the reasons that I’m not really into reality TV is that I know that very little of it is actually real. I was a big fan of the TV show UnREAL, a drama series about the making of a reality TV show that ended too soon in my opinion. The show did a really great job at showing how reality TV producers are good at creating situations and editing the footage to tell a certain story or cast contestants in a certain light that might be contradictory to what really happened. And while that is maybe morally questionable, people like reality TV because it’s dramatic and exciting and there are heroes and villains. Actual reality can be pretty boring and doesn’t always make for must-see TV. However, since seeing how it is produced, every time I watch reality TV, I can’t stop thinking about how the narrative may have been manipulated to show what the producers wanted us to see.
One of the things I really liked about Lily is that despite being a big reality TV fan and wanting to go on the show, Lily is also aware of this. In the beginning of the story and at several points throughout, she thinks about how her actions are being presented to viewers and the way that can impact how they feel about her. Toward the end, when she falls into a depression, a question she desperately asks is whether or not the viewers like her. In addition to the rewards they take with them, one of the best outcomes contestants can hope for is a brand sponsorship from some of the rewards they received. However, a brand isn’t going to want to do a deal with a contestant the viewers didn’t feel strongly about, so even if a contestant is doing well and is on their way to winning the show, they also have to worry about capturing the hearts of the viewers, something Lily takes into consideration often. Lily thinks that she is dumb and that is a source of self consciousness for her throughout the show, but she rarely forgets that she is playing a game and is constantly looking for subtle ways to gain an upper hand on her costars.
The knowledge that she is playing a game is also what keeps Lily from speaking out against some of the stronger personalities in the game who eventually take control of the compound and the other contestants. These power dynamics also lead to a lot of the conflict at the climax of the story. That part was hard but ultimately enjoyable for me as the reader. I wanted Lily to confront these characters as the issues arose, but I also knew she needed to play the long game and didn’t want to make enemies early in the game or risk being edited into a villain character. This tension and the reality TV show format kept me really invested in the book and I read most of it in one sitting.
Something else that was masterfully done was that the book was only told from Lily’s point of view. I think in a book like this, Rawle could have written it from the perspective of multiple characters or interspersed the chapters with transcripts of what actually aired or fansite posts, or other media. I think that would have been good, but when we only get the story from Lily’s perspective, we know only what she knows. Like her, we cannot be sure what the other contestants are doing from their own motivations or due to personal tasks, we don’t know how anyone in the wider world is perceiving what is happening, and we don’t know how the producers are angling things. This builds up a lot of tension because like Lily, I think the reader has a desire to know the “truth” and we never really find that out.
I am going to talk briefly about the dystopian elements, because they are subtly in the background of this book. I usually really hate dystopian literature (in fact, I recently gave up on a book for book club because I just couldn’t do it). For me personally, when I read, I want to escape a little bit, and dystopian fiction just doesn’t seem like an escape from the very real issues that I’m worried about in the world. Those elements are something that did take away from this book for me, but they were minor enough that I could kind of sweep past them quickly. Lily mentions some sort of long ongoing war that her father was fighting in before he became MIA. She and a few other characters (mostly in their 20s) allude to having “fifteen or maybe twenty years left.” There is talk of having to wear masks in cities (unclear whether this is due to illness, pollution, or both). Even though I didn’t love them, I do think these elements are important to the story because they show why the potentially harsh life on the compound is viewed as an attractive escape to many of the characters.
Finally, I did really like the way this book commented on materialism. One of the big things that draws Lily to the show is the opportunity to win rewards she’d never be able to afford on her own. Often, when she gets a reward or drops hints about the kind of rewards she’d want she takes a minute to stop and marvel at how many hours of work it would have taken her to earn enough money to purchase that reward on her own. She marvels when people leave the house without taking as much as they can, but also feels a bit slighted when people leave and take a communal prize on the way out. Almost everyone in the compound comes to worship the rewards they have earned both communally and independently. And not all the rewards are fancy items—at two different points they nearly ran out of food and had their water turned off until they would complete a task to win them back. Lily also knows going into the show, and is reminded throughout, that oftentimes the required task is to hurt a person or relationship you have formed while on the compound in exchange for a material reward. She doesn’t want to become the kind of contestant that throws someone over for a reward, but ultimately, it is easier than she expects when the time comes. Winning the show means ending up completely alone with anything you could ever want, which I think is a pretty damning commentary on materialism and resource hoarding. It’s hard not to be materialistic in a society where we are constantly being marketed to everywhere we turn, but this book did make me think about my consumption habits.
This is Aisling Rawle’s debut novel and I found it engrossing and intelligent. I can’t wait to see what she comes up with next.