How much of your ‘self’ is your body and how much is in your mind? Would you still be you if your body was swapped for another? And what’s more important to us: our bodies or our minds? The Body by Hanif Kureshi explores these questions with great imagination, and touches of pathos and horror.
Adam is a middle-aged playwright. He’s successful and happily married, but increasingly resentful of his body. His body is starting to let him down: it sags, aches, breaks down and keeps him awake. He feels ‘like a passenger in a car spinning out of control towards the crash’ – at some point, the body will fail and his mind will be taken along with it. Through a young man he meets at a party, he is introduced to the world of Newbodies: people who have swapped their old bodies for newer models, but kept their minds. Adam takes the plunge, and in his new young body, embarks on a hedonistic 6 month trip across Europe, thinking of it as a holiday, a last fling before he goes back to his old body and the resumes decaying towards death.
Adam soon finds that being young is not everything it’s cracked up to be. As a young man without a history, he can’t form true connections with anyone and has to move on as soon as anyone suspects there’s something odd about him. He misses the respect that he was given as an older man, he misses his wife and family, and begins to look forward to returning to London and his old life.
Then things turn sinister. At a party on a yacht one night, he meets another Newbody, a 80 year old man who is looking for a young body for his dying brother. He tries to persuade Adam to sell his body, assuring him that he can get his old body back straight away. But when Adam refuses, asking to finish his 6 month ‘holiday’, the Newbody becomes violent and Adam only just escapes.
Back in London, Adam meets his wife in the street and spends an evening with her. He realises again how much he loves her, how much he misses home and his old life. He resolves to give up the new body straight away, and sets off back to the clinic where he had the operation and his old body is waiting for him in cold storage. But the clinic is empty and abandoned, save for one man waiting in the dark, because he still wants Adam’s body for his brother.
This story plays with the idea of identity and how it is rooted in both our physical bodies and our minds. Kureshi sensibly glosses over the physical possibilities of moving a mind into another body – there is no explanation of how it’s actually done – but spends a lot of time exploring how much pleasure our bodies bring us. When Adam wakes up after the operation free from the physical aches and pains of his old body he is overjoyed, and through much of his ‘holiday’ he revels in the simple pleasure of a young body that functions well. Kureshi also explores what our bodies mean to others, and how others form part of our sense of self. When Adam encounters his wife, he has to remember to hold back from her because she does not know that it’s him. Yet his mind knows her better than anyone, and he is upset when she tells Adam-the-Newbody things that she had never told him in his old body.
The story is shot through with longing: longing for youth when we are old, longing to be ourselves when we are not, longing for love in all its forms. In the end, longing is all that Adam is left with – his mind is trapped in a body that is not his, and he is faced with not only losing his life, but also his self. In an effort to preserve what he thought was his self – his mind- he has destroyed it.
This book made me think deeply about what it means to be me. It’s very easy to forget about the body until it fails, but without my body, I would not be me. My only criticism of this book would be that that the middle section is a little too long – it reads as if Kureshi popped in a set-piece about middle-aged women and the Greek Islands that he’d been waiting to use. But overall, a really interesting, though-provoking and engaging story, highly recommended.
The Body
Hanif Kureshi
Faber & Faber
