Beautiful World, Where are You
Between care, concern and consideration for your loved ones and the ‘big’ issues of life, what will preoccupy you on your deathbed?
About one-third into Rooney’s novel, one of her protagonists sends an email to another. The writer, like the receiver, is around thirty years of age.
‘….. when people are lying on their deathbeds, don’t they always start talking about their spouses and children? And isn’t death just the apocalypse in the first person? So, in that sense, there is nothing bigger than what you so derisively call ‘breaking up or staying together’ (!), because at the end of our lives, when there’s nothing left in front of us, it’s still the only thing we want to talk about. Maybe we are just born to love and worry about the people we know, and to go on loving and worrying even when there are more important things we should be doing. And if this means the human species is going to die out, isn’t it a nice reason to die out, the nicest reason you can imagine? Because when we should have been reorganising the distribution of the world’s resources and transitioning collectively to a sustainable economic model, we were worrying about sex and friendship instead. Because we loved each other too much and found each other too interesting.’
This and other questions and speculations preoccupy Eileen the writer and Alice the receiver in Beautiful World, Where are You.’ No wonder the title of the book is reflective of an interrogative mind, although it lacks a question mark. At around thirty, these characters, their friends and lovers are teetering – adult enough to lead independent, some even financially successful lives; yet unsure, vulnerable, anxious. The obsession with internet and social-media only aggravates their fragmentation as Eileen expresses it:each day has now become a new and unique informational unit, interrupting and replacing the informational world of the day before and people have been spending more and more time looking at the news.Are these millennials going to find the (beautiful) world? More importantly, is it there at all, waiting to be found?
Eileen, the voice behind the opening passage of this review, works for a subsidised literary magazine in Dublin and earns twenty thousand a year before taxes. She considers herself working class, barely affording rent and unable to take a shower sometimes because the water has run out, after her housemates have taken theirs. With her university education and an excellent academic career behind her, she is given to ruminations: civilization in its present manifestation is ugly. The mass production of goods with their plastic trappings and the beauty industry - created on the backs of people born in less privileged circumstances than herself, makes her stop in her tracks and think how none of this at the cost of the immense suffering of others, has added any quality to her life. While she can articulate her feelings about degradation and ugliness on all fronts of life, including the city of Dublin, with its buildings and cars, what can she do about it but to live the way she does, and consume the way she does? This, and much else, she shares with her best friend, Alice.
Alice replies that for her, ‘human beings lost the capacity for beauty when the Berlin Wall came down’. Alice and Eileen’s email correspondence intersperses details of their relationships with their lovers with such thoughts and opinions on politics, history, society, art, the Church and includes the big issues of the day as they see them – climate change; the rise of the conservative right and the failure of the political elite; the problem with the contemporary Euro-American novel, and much more.
For, writerly questions preoccupy Alice – a reclusive novelist and Rooney’s alter ego. The contemporary Euro-American novel, according to Alice, is in a crisis because it isn’t possible to place the suffering and misery of most of humanity side by side with the lives of the main characters of these novels in an artistically acceptable way. So, the novelist must suppress the lived realities of those exploited millions by ‘packing it down underneath the glittering surface of the text’. Only when this is done, can the reader care about the loves and lives of folks like Eileen and herself. She, Alice (and therefore by extension Rooney herself) is also guilty of this. Rooney is a self-proclaimed Marxist. She declined Israeli publisher Modan’s offer to translate ‘Beautiful World Where are You’ into Hebrew, in solidarity with the Palestinian people, and subsequently some major bookstores in Israel stopped selling her work.
Alice has retreated to a quiet Irish seaside village and is recovering from a nervous breakdown. She claims she abhors the publicity that her recent success has brought her. Yet this does not stop her from accepting an invitation to travel to Rome to introduce her new novel, and to exude charm and use humour to seduce her rapt audience even further. On an impulse, she has invited Felix, who she met only once on a date through Tinder, to join her on this business trip. He, to his own surprise, accepted. Alice paid for his flight tickets. The plot thickens as the two get into a relationship that they don’t quite know how to take further.
Rooney’s novel begins with Alice, waiting in a bar for Felix to arrive. The opening pages reflect typical Rooney themes – class, gender, and power dynamics. Felix, a blue-collar worker spends his days at a job he hates - order-picking in a warehouse, and, according to his brother Damian, has never read a book in his life. He shares a house with a group of people, and a dog abandoned by the previous residents. Alice has what was once the village rectory, with its four bedrooms, strategically located on a hill, all to herself, and is, in her own words, a millionaire. To assuage Eileen’s inquisitive mind about whether or not she is sleeping with Felix, she writes to her from Rome that to her ‘human relationships are soft, like sand or water, and by pouring them into a particular vessel we give them shape. So, a mother’s relationship with her daughter is poured into a vessel marked ‘mother and child’….’ To extend the metaphor to express her relationship with Felix, the water is poured with no preordained shape in mind, and runs off in all directions. While sometimes this ‘experiment’ is a disaster, at other times it feels like ‘the only type of relationship worth having’.
Mirroring this relationship is the one Eileen shares with Simon, older by some years and a childhood friend, whose parents live on the farm neighbouring that of her parents. The teen-aged Simon was the only person in the child Eileen’s life who gave her respect and attention, and she soon yearned for more than friendship, but in vain. As adults however, and after each had broken love affairs, the two, both Dubliners occasionally engage in intense, fulfilling sex and share deep secrets and intimacies. Yet, they are not destined to be lovers for long, as the miscommunication between them gets in their way.
If you have read Rooney’s ‘Normal People’ be prepared, as a reader of this book, to have your heart broken again. Why don’t these intelligent, lovable, beautiful, articulate people, you might ask yourself, see that they can find happiness together instead of struggling through life in isolation? But perhaps, this is the baby boom response to the searching millennials of Rooney’s novels, who as her protagonists say, have had the misfortune to be have been born after the world has already ended. History, says Alice, ended with the collapse of the Soviet Union. Clearly late capitalism’s offers are not being lapped up by anyone here, and each needs to find meaning from their own cocooned existence.
So where are these characters finding refuge? Simon is a practising Catholic, which earns him the derision of Felix and Eileen’s sister, Lola. What’s more, he’s an idealist working for a small left-wing party when he could be making a lot of money. Yet, the Catholic church, and Jesus in particular do have a strong presence in the life of Alice; Eileen accompanies Simon to mass and despite herself feels uplifted at the end of it; Lola has a church wedding. One of the defining moments in this novel takes place in the context of this wedding in a church as Eileen and Simon gaze at each other. In filmic terms, the flashbacks fill the reader in with images of past events and memories that cross the minds of each of them. This framing sets the bond between them as soulmates on a spiritual plane.
However, running into the arms of the church to escape the ‘end of history’ is not what Rooney seems to want for any of her characters. When questioned about his prolific pre-marital sex life, Simon quotes St. Augustine ‘lord make me pure, but not yet.’ Sex between the two sets of partners – Simon and Eileen, and Alice and Felix gives each of them immense pleasure and fulfilment. Also, there is an ease in the way the protagonists find themselves participating in sexual encounters with other and same sex partners which figure in their accounts of past and present relationships, and an ease with how they move on. This too, reflects the softening of hard lines and even the ambiguity that appears to envelop the characters of this novel. Yet, sex is not what these characters run to either. It makes us hopeful for the characters, as the evade and avoid escape.
Rooney’s prose, with its signature lack of the fuss around punctuation (the avoidance of speech marks to demarcate conversations, or a question mark to end a question) is packed with vivid descriptions and eloquent language, like the metaphor of the pouring of water in a vessel to define relationships. Conversations are spare in the number of words used, yet witty, humorous, and define characters through vocabulary and voice. The two friends repeat, respond and carry conversations further via their email exchange, the contemporary expression of the epistolary novel. Chapters switch between the omniscient voice describing settings and characters, and conversations in the third person, and the first-person voices of Eileen and Alice through emails.
This is not a plot-driven novel. The storyline is thin and moves between the past and present, and between Eileen, Alice, Simon and Felix, and a few minor characters. Their parents, for instance, with whom almost all of them experience distance or outright conflict – a clear indication of the generation gap. Despite its apparent ‘plotlessness’, the story imperceptibly moves towards a climax. And, because it would be a spoiler, I will avoid revealing what triggers these troubled, anxious souls to introspect on themselves and in all honesty to inspect their relationships to each other and to the (beautiful) world in the final pages of the novel. Typical Rooney questions crop up: can good friends be great lovers and still be friends? If your friendship is as deep as Simon and Eileen’s, would transitioning to being spouses end your friendship? And, should this happen, who would they turn to?
In place of a strong plot, expect to delve into the lives and reflections of characters, most of them highly educated, engaging in conversations and ruminations that you, hopefully find familiar. In the absence of these resonating with you, this novel could be a disappointment.
Despite the generation gap between myself and the millennial author and her protagonists, there was enough I could relate to. After all, the search for meaning, for fulfilling relationships, and for how to contribute and participate in a world that appears to be collapsing around us at a tremendous pace, preoccupies many of us irrespective of when we were born. The interrogative mind that continues, even in the absence of an immediate answer, to ask questions, I find particularly absorbing. I also appreciate how Rooney, through Alice, reflects on the role of the novelist in the part of the world I live in now, and find her sincerity refreshing. Above all, I feel that once again, Sally Rooney connects me to millennials, to what makes them different from me, while at the same time she succeeds in bridging the gap as I recognize the uncertainties, the suffering, but also what is hopeful in these characters in their search for meaning and fulfilment.