Book review: Extreme fitness and romantic obsession drives psychological thriller

There is a serious core to 'Sweat' as Cassie’s obsession builds, and its sensational ending explores just how far coercive control can take you

Author Emma Healey’s first novel, Elizabeth is Missing, was a best-seller and won a prestigious Costa Book Award in 2014.

• Sweat
• Emma Healey 
• Hutchinson Heinemann, €15.99

Cassie and Tanya first met him at a park bootcamp session.

They went hoping to lose some weight, having tried and failed at spin, Zumba, and Pilates, finding them too intimidating — “all those people who were just better than us at moving their bodies”, as Cassie the narrator writes.

His name was Liam: “He was fresh-scented and friendly, bouncing through the participants, pleased, proud as a cockerel amongst his rare-breed hens. His shouted commands were a punishment and a thrill.

“The regulars all worked hard to get his attention, to get a nod… I didn’t work hard, I resisted, rolled my eyes at the motivational messages, the spontaneous cheers, the breathless enthusiasm.”

Her indifference acts like catnip on the handsome personal trainer, and soon he is explaining muscle groups to her, cooking her salmon with butter beans and harissa and, er, giving her end-of-session massages. They become an item and she moves in to his flat.

That was in the past. The novel is set in dual time frames — the two years of the abusive relationship between Liam and Cassie, and their meeting five months later. 

Cassie has qualified as a personal trainer, and Liam, now blind from the effects of a brain tumour, joins a gym looking for help to regain his fitness. 

In the life-changing split second between first seeing him and introducing herself as his trainer, Cassie decides to disguise herself by deepening her voice, adding a south London accent and changing her name to Steph. 

It is evidence of the compelling nature of Emma Healey’s prose that we keep on reading after this unlikely manoeuvre.

Liam now has long hair in a man-bun, a blond-brown beard and has lost the sheen of the super-fit. 

Assuming he is telling the truth about his blindness, Liam has a reason for not recognising Cassie at first.

But given that they were living together only five months ago, his failure to recognise her undermines the story.

Rather than a romance, this is a psychological thriller about a toxic relationship, a genre that has produced several best-sellers — The Girl on the Train (2014) by Paula Hawkins, for example, or Colleen Hoover’s It Ends With Us (2016).

Sweat has the added interest of being an inside account of what drives people to extremes of fitness training: “We want this. We like it. We like to be sore and we like to be stiff and we like to be tired.” 

It is Healey’s third novel. The first, Elizabeth is Missing (2014), sold millions, won the Costa First Novel Award and was filmed with Glenda Jackson.

Healey has had her own problems (revealed in a recent interview with The Guardian) with over-exercising and fasting when the regime she adopted when recovering from the birth of her first child proved excessive.

As more details about Liam and Cassie’s relationship are revealed, Cassie’s desire to work so closely with a man she struggled to escape from becomes ever more baffling. 

He takes charge of every aspect of her life, from her fitness routines to contraception and counting her calories. 

He locks the fridge so she cannot over-eat. Alcohol is forbidden. When she refuses to confront him, her friends forsake her.

Tanya observes that Cassie has become even more obsessive about Liam than he was about her. Why, having once escaped his control, should she want a professional relationship with him?

The hurts Cassie inflicts on the blind man in revenge are initially minor and trivial. 

But there is a serious core to the novel as Cassie’s obsession builds, and its sensational ending explores just how far coercive control can take you.