Leave the World Behind: placid horror
Title: Leave the World Behind
Author: Rumaan Alam
Publisher: Ecco HarperCollins
Pages: 241
My rating: ⭐⭐⭐
Who will like it? If you like a book that provokes you to ponder your relationship with the rest of the world, you can appreciate this book. Not all books are for everyone, and this certainly is not a relaxing or pleasurable hedonist piece.
The story is set in a mansion on the very outskirts of Long Island, where an average, middle-class, white American family is on vacation and retreating from the rest of the world for a week. The house is “not actually on a farm, so not a farmhouse. Not especially old, so not an historic house. Not brand-new and tricked out, so not a luxury house. Just a quiet place, the ends of the earth, somewhere to be alone and quiet and comfortable.” (p. 217)
But outside of that house, and slowly inside too, the world is crumbling, and there is no way they can escape the blossoming malignant tumour of society. An elderly African American couple claiming to be owners of their rental house comes knocking on their door to seek refuge, as the rest of the world sinks into Armageddon.
This book isn’t comfortable to read. At times, a third narrator coldly sheds light beyond the viewpoints of the few characters in the book, casually mentioning to us readers how “all the babies in the neonatal intensive care unit died within hours” (p. 236), and a Chinese man running the laundromat is currently stuck in an elevator, who will be helpless for hours before dying. The world is literally falling apart, but people just watched, panicked on the inside, and then clung to normalcy, convincing themselves that all is okay. In response to impending doom, all these people do is crave the palliative calm of TV, have sex, stuff themselves full of cake, and cling selfishly to religion whether they believed in it or not during final moments of panic. When they meet others who are stranded and distressed and screaming, these people hesitatingly turn around and declared them as strangers, and still believe their own courses of life to be separate and sheltered from apocalypse.
At points, the characters are all described like animals and the millions of migrating animals are eerily described as aware and alert. Some prose is so revolting that it jerked me back from reading. There are jarring descriptions of bodily fluids and the crassness of children, who care about nothing except what directly affects them. The middle-class adults hold a facade of friendliness but have not grown out of that mindset either.
The minds of people in this decade are preoccupied with many things, including inextricable dependency and addiction to technology. When this so-called “blackout” hits, no signal and no connection means that “without [their] phones, it turns out [they’re] basically marooned out here.” (p. 101) How completely lost we are without the overflow of information and basic functions of wireless communication just come to show how overconfident and ignorant human beings can be. While nobody knows what the hell is going on, people still throw around pretentious words, without admitting that they know next to nothing about cellular signals or the satellite internet access they eat up every day.
Alam writes about how we cling to normalcy in the most traumatizing moments in denial and how we meekly and stubbornly just assume that things are normal — eat more and it’ll be fine, smoke a cigarette and all our problems will resolve themselves. We’re stuck in an egocentric point of view with our own problems and we value our image more than admitting that we are complicit in contributing to the end of the world.
How passive and apathetic are we? I read a news article on climate despair this morning, and all I can feel is the passivity and horror and shock as our world goes up in flames.
I think Alam leaves the mark he intends to, but the placid plot and retraction from reality could be done as eloquently with half the number of pages. Sometimes this book imitates real life by slightly repeating a conversation or slowing down and recording every thought, which makes the prose feel close and immediate, but nonetheless diffuse.
