Matters because Franklin’s most salient gifts are old-fashioned ones. She’s a confident storyteller with reserves of judgment and discrimination. You know from the first pages that you’re reading the work of a novelist, not just someone who has written a novel ... Also a love story of a sensitive and melancholy sort. In her sex writing, Franklin does a lot with a little ... The plot machinations churn more jerkily than they might have. Franklin is good enough that she needn’t have leaned so hard on them ... Impressive.
A fast, harsh, smart and fun satire of contemporary tech elites ... The story moves swiftly and delivers fast-flowing takes on data, pharma, ageing, connectivity; what people want, how people love, and how the internet changes everything. It’s pacy but also always analytical. Holding both of those things together feels like an expression of respect for the reader ... Bonding’s finale is, fittingly, both dramatic and analytical, unfolding its author’s vision of how online movements can manifest in violence.
It’s rare but it does happen: a debut novel comes along that’s so obviously impressive, so advanced in the reach of its ideas and the gracefulness of its execution, that you want to start proselytising for it before you’ve even turned the final page. With its dissident intelligence and its comprehensive vision of a devastated social sphere, Mariel Franklin’s Bonding is the work of an author whose importance already feels assured ... Franklin brilliantly conveys the peculiar, posthuman coldness of 21st-century London ... Few anglophone novelists risk this kind of sweeping civilisational vision, let alone pull it off with such aplomb.
Franklin is prone to shorthand characterizations largely based on consumer habits … These allusions don’t seem to signify much beyond their face value ... Franklin’s story feels too deep in that muck to recognize that things could even be otherwise. Her observations about the state of precarious employment, online polarization and the erosion of community at the hands of social media are less incisive than they are summative, almost like Wikipedia entries: informative, perhaps, but common knowledge to many.
Smart, disturbing ... A novel of ideas, but it’s peopled with compelling figures, especially its secondary characters ... Franklin has written one of the most stimulating novels I have read about the struggle for self-fulfilment in the modern-day attention economy. However, it’s not without its flaws. After a confident opening, the story and characters take too long to get up and running ... Still, I couldn’t help but admire Franklin’s rather old-fashioned mission. She is exploring the collision of individual desires and social customs.
