Leave The World Behind by Rumaan Alam

leave the world behind

OK.  This book is laavished with praise on its cover. And I found it in one of those free book swap spacces, hencce why I’m reading some contemporary acclaimed American establishment fiction, which isn’t something I go towards too often. But it sounded like something that could be fun. Interesting. Engaging.

And about 20 pages in, I was unconvinced. I thought to myself, “Is this book good, or is it just horny?” But 20 pages on from that, and right through to the end of the book, I was able to answer that question very easily. It’s very good, and not actually very horny. It’s just front-loaded with horn. Maybe as a way to lure people in, unsuspecting, to the resounding and potent horrors that exist within.

Christ. It’s not an easy read, emotionally. 

Cynics who’ve seen a few movies, early on in the text, will definitely mutter to themselves (and this is the way people like me talk), “Oh, this is just the same as Michel HAneke’s 199x Isabel Huppert vehicle, Season of the Wolf”

And in some ways, yes, yes it is… It’s an apocalypse happening that opens with middle class people in a rural holiday home in the middle of the countryside, with ambiguous and distant calamities happening far, far away… There’s no clarity for the characters about what’s happening, and life and death is, suddenly, cheaper and more precious at the same time…

But where this book diverts from almost all other “people at the end of the world who have no knowledge about what’s happening” narratives – and there are a lot of them – is through the inclusion of possibly the most omniscient narrator I’ve encountered in a very long time.

The narrator is third person, is not a character, is not a person, but they know it all. And, as the book goes on, and strangeness and danger get closer and closer and closer to the families and the figures who are hiding away from the cities, the narrator cuts in with revelations about what is happening in the cities, what is happening in the skies, what is happening across the ocean and – crucially – where it all leads. The ambiguous apocalypse that the characters are experiencing – catastrophically loud sounds in the sky, communication and utility breakdown, strange feelings in the body and weakening illnesses that make no sense, animals in places and numbers that don’t cohere with expectations – is not the ambiguous apocalypse the reader is experiencing, and as the book goes on and the gaps between their guesses and hopes and the complex understanding of the global, near-hopeless, collapse that  the reader is learning about via the know-everything narrator widen and- 

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ok ok ok it’s been like 3 weeks

ummm

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ok ok it’s now been almost five weeks since i read this and i’ve got a bit of a backlog on writing about books that I thought were more interesting than this one (which i did like), but the other ones are fresher in my mind and i’m running out of time time time to get it down and…

i’ve been busy

august was

i went to the edinburgh festival fringe and performed a 45 minute fully nude poetry set

i’m working on finalising my alternative comedy slash spoken word performance BALD PERSONALITY DISORDER

i’m doing work!

i went away to stay alone on a boat with my baby for most of a week!

i’ve been busy

busy busy busy

will catch up on the blog soon

i promise

i always have

TOTN i always come back to u

my true love

quoted in print in the New Yorker in 2022

featured on Dennis Cooper’s blog in 2025, baybee!!!!

Triumph Of The Now exists

thank u for reading and apologies this one went nowhere

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i liked this book tho, yes, yes i did

eerie

spooky

loved, absolutely loved, the idea of the omniscient narrator who knows truly everything and no one involved ever learns anything…

the next book I read (will write something about that soon, though i also read that almost a month ago) was John Le Carré’s The Honourable Schoolboy, which also has an unseen omniscient narrator that knows everything, though in this case only things related to the story and they could conceivably be one of the intelligence operatives featured in it doing a retrospective summary.

So actually they’re not the same

absolute nonsense.

Thank you and bye again