BEAUTIFUL WORLD, WHERE ARE YOU

 

        'Aren't we unfortunate babies to be born when the world ended? After that there was no chance for the planet, and no chance for us.  Or maybe it was just the end of one civilisation, ours, and at some time in the future another will take its place.  In that case we are standing in the last lighted room before the darkness, bearing witness to something.'

Sally Rooney is a young and brilliant writer, accurately capturing the hesitancy of the zeitgeist.  I say this before I write a somewhat critical review of her latest offering.  Beautiful World, Where are You (without question mark, so passé) has divided my social media feed ever since it came to publication, so I had to delve in and see for myself.  Like her previous novels, Beautiful World explores the relationships between four characters who, in this case, are a bit older, all hovering around the significant age of thirty and in the grips of existential inertia. The passage above seemed to me, when I read it, to sum up the heart of the book and also encapsulates, nebulously, my own view of the younger generation.  Because, although Rooney's characters are a little older in this novel, she is still really writing about a younger generation.  These characters live in house-shares, are unmarried and childless, essentially only responsible for themselves but nevertheless, carry with them a great weight. What is the weight? 

It is what I notice in the young: A caution and a cynicism that stops them in their tracks.  A lot of the novel focuses on the female characters' inability to prostrate themselves for the men that they profess to love; to hold something of themselves back at all times.  As a feminist, I feel that I should enjoy this as a manifestation of female power, except these characters are definitively without power.  And as a reader, I would love at least one of the characters to prostrate themselves for something, to run towards the fear, to care, to indulge.  Because then, something might actually happen.  It is tempting, whilst reading, to feel that the main thing weighing on these young people is their astoundingly boring personalities.  They may indeed be very real.  Rooney is concerned with what is real now, which is why the long emails between the female characters that form a big part of the narrative are, I assume, her own stream of consciousness.  At times, I wasn't sure if I was reading Alice's or Eileen's words.  They were largely interchangeable.  The content of these emails was genuinely interesting and I would welcome a book of essays from Rooney but it was a little lazy.  The two male characters were much more identifiable because they were so different.  Perhaps Rooney only really knows women who are like herself, or Alice, or Eileen.

So it's a novel where not much happens and this is my natural terrain as a reader.  Only, Rooney is not much bothered with giving us any aesthetic pleasure from her prose.  It is frustratingly and presumably, deliberately, flat. At the end of the non-epistolary chapters, the narrative switches to the present tense where the narrator gives an overview of the scene that has just played out; a sort of zooming out of perspective which is deliberately visual.  In this way, the nod to cinematic effects and the flat prose suggest that Rooney is now so secure in the knowledge that her novels will be televised that she is jumping ahead and writing for the screen.  Or, that her natural medium is actually drama.  In a recent interview, Rooney claims that her prose is 'secondary to the characters'.  Perhaps she might consider, in her next novel some attempt at using language to elevate or provide humour, or, goodness me, perhaps to entertain.  No spoilers here but don't pick up a Sally Rooney novel if you're looking for humour. I think the best way of describing this book is in culinary terms.  It will do you good and as such, it is uncompromising in its wholesome credentials but in order to really enjoy it, which I believe Rooney would consider basic, you need to refine your palette.