Sweat by Emma Healey review – from trauma to treadmill

Emma Healey’s first novel, the bestselling Elizabeth Is Missing (2014), was narrated by an elderly woman losing her memory. Her second, Whistle in the Dark (2018), told the story of a 15-year-old girl who goes missing for four days and returns refusing to speak about what happened. Sweat again focuses on a woman in peril. Cassie, the narrator, is a personal trainer who left her controlling boyfriend, Liam, two years before the start of the novel.

They initially met when Cassie attended his bootcamp classes; Liam now turns up at the gym where Cassie works, seeking to take advantage of an offer of half-price personal training sessions for those with disabilities. Liam is claiming to be blind; and though Cassie, who is assigned as his trainer, is unsure of how impaired his sight really is, she decides to pretend to be someone else and perhaps wreak some kind of revenge on him.

Despite her scepticism, she is intrigued enough to attempt various tasks with her eyes shut, including running on a treadmill. Healey has done her research (she thanks two personal trainers in the acknowledgments), and the scenes of Cassie sneakily adding extra weights to Liam’s barbells are surprisingly tense.

She also makes the obvious link between fear and exercise: they “produce the same results: faster breathing; increased heart rate; sweating; muscle discomfort; needing to wee, even. This is why you shouldn’t be too hard on a client who seems to be afraid of exercise. It’s not laziness, it’s self-protection. And it’s more pronounced in someone who’s suffered trauma. Of course they don’t want to get in a situation where they experience the exact same feelings.”

Cassie, who can’t help but judge everyone on the state of their body, is still attracted to Liam, despite the previous abuse: his “tautening skin, the stirring muscles, those green eyes”. She is ambivalent about taking revenge – filling his drinks bottle with water from the toilet before relenting after he takes a swig, and pouring the rest away. All of this is well evoked, but it is difficult to sustain the drama over nearly 400 pages of what is essentially two people going to the gym. There are, of course, other characters, and scenes that take place elsewhere, but the central face-off is between Liam and Cassie as she puts him through his paces.

And Liam is incredibly dull, as bullies who are obsessed with counting macros tend to be, even if he then suffers a health crisis all of his own. Although the novel is a useful corrective to anyone thinking of embarking on a lifestyle overhaul – giving up bread and going on early morning runs will not, it suggests, turn out well – Sweat never really takes flight.