A few years ago, I went on a date with a guy who, within the first few minutes, told me how he always took his first dates to the same bar and, if possible, sat in the same seat, the very one we were sitting in. How romantic, I thought, wondering how quickly I could cut and run.
It’s the sort of remark that Caden, the boyfriend of Plaything’s narrator Anna, might revel in as he can scarcely get through a sentence without mentioning his ex. She tries not to let this bother her but when his comments begin to sound more like comparisons than memories, they sting.
Bea Setton crafts a brittle protagonist in Anna. A Cambridge PhD student who spends her days euthanising mice, she doesn’t fulfil the traditional notion of feminine beauty, being tall and broad, with hair that defies taming, and a brain that intimidates her male colleagues.
And yet Caden, a looker, falls for her so quickly that soon they’re living together, with Anna trying to ignore the ex’s toiletries that remain lined up along the bathroom shelves and the spare room filled with boxes of her belongings.
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“People often pretend not to care about beauty when it is often the very thing affecting them most deeply,” her mother remarks, a more sympathetic character than her narcissist father whose attitudes towards fidelity and female pulchritude have done nothing to build her self-esteem. Conscious of her supposed deficiencies, Anna compensates by embracing a conventional male obsession – football – and there’s an irony that, in doing so, she mirrors the ex, who played for Paris St Germain’s women’s team.
Much of Plaything takes place during the Covid lockdown and Setton excels at describing that stressful period, focusing not on the trauma of isolation but on the pressure of being in another person’s company all day, every day.
A cold novel, then, but one that will remain with me. The surprises work, a twist towards the end left me uttering an expletive aloud, and the final page made me shudder. Animal lovers, however, be warned. It’s not just the mice who suffer.
