Thoughts on Beautiful World, Where Is It by Sally Rooney (PLOT SPOILER ALERT)

 

This initially seemed to me like a very artful novel. The alternating plot/email chapter structure works well in subverting the concept of The Novel – languid, patient but smouldering observations of the “why the feck am I writing this book” fourth-walling variety.

 

The novel’s central problem, however, is that none of its four central characters is really lovable, in the sense that the reader cannot empathise with them. In addition, the plot itself is rather fanciful; are we really meant to believe that a world-famous author living in a rectory is going to get off with a semi-literate Amazon drone she encountered on Tinder?

 

The sex scenes seem painted in, as if someone had commissioned the author on pain of loss of publishing advance to paint them in, and gratuitous. Sadder, however, is the ending, wherein all four main characters abruptly act and behave out of character in order to ensure a pat “happy” ending, as if the book’s ghost had been given up to the departments of marketing and accounting. Worst is the denouement, which depressingly goes back to the fundamentally misogynist trope of a woman is only truly complete WH*N SH* H*S A B*BY. No doubt there was also an eye on sequels and movie/TV franchises.

 

This abject surrender renders the impression of Ms Rooney being a less-than-great writer. All great novels, from Don Quixote to Ducks, Newburyport, satisfy because they incorporate closure into their story, or stories. But the ending to BWWII reads as though the author had been made to write it.

 

One central creed is that both Alice and Eileen are women who have been brought up to expect rather more from life than life is able to offer. Both the products of frankly dysfunctional families (Alice’s is only really hinted at, but Eileen’s is spelled out), they have been made victims of chimeras, the fairytale paradises they were promised in the stories read to them (or, in Eileen’s case, even written by them) wilt against the cold rationalism of the less-than-beautiful world that they have been compelled to inhabit. Felix and Simon (especially Simon) are nowhere near the answers that they seek.

 

Which is why something like Anthony Doerr’s Cloud Cuckoo Land is so immeasurably and intensely greater a novel; his Anna, his Konstance, break through the walls which had been imposed on them and find something else, and better. Omeir’s introduction to Anna is as brutally un-romantic as Felix’s initial liaisons with Alice. But the character of Omeir is sketched in with so much more detail and background that the cumulative togetherness is better understood and expressed, probably because they had a lot more to fight for, or through, and, literally, nothing left to lose. This is not really the impression one gets from BWWII. Whereas the central message of CCL is like a rebuttal to the protagonist Quixote, arguing, or persuading, that books, far from imprisoning us in their relentless fantasia, could actually permit us to survive.