This chilling novel exposes the algorithmic hell of modern dating

Bonding, Mariel Franklin’s debut fiction novel, paints a reality we haven’t quite owned up to yet. Franklin observes that, due to 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 many dating apps 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 Bret Easton Ellis’ Less Than Zero was numb from the drugs and lasers of 1980s Los Angeles, Bonding 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 in the circles she formatively worked and studied in (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 it 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?  

Mariel Franklin: 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 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 once 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. 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 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. 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. 

Tell me about the culture at Goldsmiths, and how it found its way into Bonding.

Mariel Franklin: 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 conventional literature [than other students]. I was probably a bit more of a pervert than they were, too. I had a friend growing up whose parents lived on the top floor of an old people’s home, and we were left to our own devices there when they were working. 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. 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.

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?

Mariel Franklin: 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 enables them to see society anew. From my point of view, the online media environment is so all-encompassing that I think humour 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 manoeuvre. 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 think 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

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?

Mariel Franklin: 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.

“I really wanted to make something that didn’t feel desirable in the way that most cultural artifacts do” - Mariel Franklin

Your work-in-progress follow-up is a mystery set in the world of London academia. Can you reveal anything about the plot and what it might signal? And do you have a favourite fictional detective?

Mariel Franklin: 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 in universities.

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 I’d interracted with an early language 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 aisle 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