21-05-2025
This young British novelist is succeeding where others fail
To Rest Our Minds and Bodies, the debut novel by the promising 25-year-old British novelist Harriet Armstrong, ostensibly tells a straightforward and rather uneventful tale. Its unnamed narrator is a psychology student in the final year of her degree at an unspecified campus university in the early 2020s. She attends lectures, grappling with the ideas she encounters therein. She thinks about books she has read, exhibitions she has seen, film and TV shows she has watched. She spends time with a few close friends.
Increasingly, however, her attentions are preoccupied by one person in particular: Luke, a postgraduate student in computer science, who lives in the room next to hers. Their friendship blossoms after Luke's girlfriend breaks up with him. And although it's pretty clear to the reader that he has 'friend-zoned' the narrator, she – not especially practiced when it comes to matters of the heart, and at this point still a virgin – is completely infatuated.
Armstrong's narrator worries about the fact that nothing of substance has ever happened to her. 'Somehow through existing I repelled action,' she thinks. But she's not so much eagerly waiting for action – which would merely be in line with that traditional trope of the in-between-ness of one's student years, caught between childhood and adolescence, waiting for life proper to start – as waiting for very specific ontological revelations:
I did very badly want to know what things fundamentally meant. I still felt that everything around me had some hidden core, I felt that the most important and central meanings were concealed and had to be effortfully unearthed. I really couldn't wait for all those meanings to be revealed to me.
And Luke bursts into her life as if he had been fashioned exactly for her – 'acting like the model of an approachable, delightful person… like an actor placed inside my kitchen to delight me'.
A certain dispassionate, matter-of-fact prose style has become characteristic of too much contemporary fiction: my heart now reflexively sinks when I encounter it. In such novels, the narrators observe their own lives with the practiced, measured eye of anthropologists. Often they are, as Armstrong's narrator calls them, 'vaguely disembodied cerebral girls'. (This is tongue-in-cheek on Armstrong's part: they're not just the kind of books the narrator likes to read, they're the kind she thinks she would write if she ever wrote one herself.) Seemingly unable to experience a given moment, instead they're trapped in a Mobius strip-like loop of endless real-time analysis. It can make for laborious reading.
To Rest Our Minds and Bodies is one of the purest examples of this style that I've encountered yet, so my hackles were initially raised. But I soon found myself proved wrong. So much writing in this vein falls foul of its own aloofness, but the success of Armstrong's work lies in how she conveys all the intensities of her narrator's experiences – from the intellectual, through the emotional, to every part of her embodied life (pain, pleasure, disgust) – through prose that's consistently reserved to the point of incredible clarity. It's rare to encounter so purely candid and redolent a portrait of a life. Instead of fatigue, the novel inspires something closer to exaltation, proving that the accolades that preceded it – Armstrong's publication of a handful of well-received short stories, and her 2024 residency at the Giancarlo DiTrapano Foundation for Literature and the Arts – did indeed herald genuine talent.
About halfway through the novel, the narrator writes a short story about her recent attempt to lose her virginity. Another girl in her writers' group disparages the 'faux naïveté' of the work's tone, a criticism that leaves the poor narrator bemused. 'I hadn't made any kind of choice in describing it like that,' she thinks to herself. She'd merely been rendering her experience as realistically as she could. One has the sense that Armstrong might use the same defence for this novel. To Rest Our Minds and Bodies is a fraught chamber piece of emotional intensity: an age-old story – of the highs and lows of first love, and of a young person finding their place in the world – told in a way that feels unsettling, exciting and very fresh.
