Beautiful world: where are you? a review-ish

 

 

Beautiful world: where are you?

 

I wanted to be friends with Sally Rooney, or at least in my head I thought we could, because I felt I connected with her writing.

What is the book about? My wife asked me, I posed, gave it a good few seconds to think and replied: people, I think.

Few decades ago I heard a joke which given my age at the time it was funny, I grew up and the meaning of the joke grew with me, the joke goes:

A man found a button, took to a tailor to make a suit that matches.

Over the years I came across many “buttons” that I made suits to match. Towards the end of the book Alice (one of the characters) talks through an email about how a journalist ran an article about her because of a comment she made answering her question, and then how people on twitter tweeted about her relationship making judgments on her life from that sentence. For a moment I thought that was Rooney’s button, I imagined that Sally Rooney saw a tweet about her -or someone else- and she wanted to write about it, from that she created those characters and their lives and ended up with a book about the world. But again I thought I am making the same mistake that journalist and the person who tweeted about Alice, were making a judgement from an impression.

 

I am always fascinated how novelists narrate a story, some use one of the characters to tell the story, some use themselves – the author- as the narrator. Few books I read, and I love, the role of the narrator is shared, not just by the characters in the story, but also by the author. Rooney used an interesting approach to tell the story, there is the narrator telling us parts of what’s happening, surprisingly, or unsurprisingly, the narrator is just like us, at some scenes they are distant and not sure of what exactly happening, they can not tell us the expressions on the person’s face, they are like us baffled by someone’s actions, and why they are doing it. Then you have the emails, and like letters, emails have gone out of fashion. I often use emails to communicate with a very close friend, and I could easily relate to the notion of writing long email discussing beauty as a concept and spread of Marxism. Rooney used these emails to help us explore the characters, their view of the world and motives for doing what they do.

When the story is being narrated Rooney uses a unique way of writing, in my head it sounded like I was listening to audio description for the blind on the TV. The language is simple, short sentences, cold and algorithmic, as if you are reading a programmer script. And like the programmer script, when you run it on a computer it creates worlds of wonder in your mind, and so does the story. Here is an extract from the book (I edited the presentation, to illustrate my point, read it loud, use the voice of the audio description from the TV):

On the platform of a train station,

late morning,

early June:

two women embracing after a separation of several months.

Behind them, a tall fair-haired man alighting from the train carrying two suitcases.

The women unspeaking, their eyes closed tight, their arms wrapped around one another,

for a second, two seconds, three.

(now, you can see how the text seamlessly transforms from a shallow descriptive algorithm to something else, read for yourself)

Were they aware, in the intensity of their embrace, of something slightly ridiculous about this tableau, something almost comical, as someone nearby sneezed violently into a crumpled tissue; as a dirty discarded plastic bottle scuttled along the platform under a breath of wind; as a mechanised billboard on the station wall rotated from an advertisement for hair products to an advertisement for car insurance; as life in its ordinariness and even ugly vulgarity imposed itself everywhere all around them?

 

This scene/ text is describing two friends embracing their true human feelings in this absurd materialistic world. This apparent contradiction between our inside and outside, between how we live every moment different from another, this contradiction goes on throughout the story, but in a subtle way, soft and sublime that you hardly notice, except when you choose to notice, or when Sally Rooney wants you to notice.

 

I found the book truly entertaining - especially if you try and read it in Irish accent, at least in my head. The reason I picked up the book is Sally Rooney’s brave stance to support Palestinians human rights and condemning the Israeli occupation, I felt obliged to read her book/s. The story, as a story is predictable, in the same way life is, but only once we live it we realise it is what we expected. It is also complex, life and the story, you move with the characters trying to judge them and judge their actions, and at every juncture you realise that you were wrong, and you change your mind, again, just like real life.

 

What’s the book about? I hear you ask; people, I guess.

Ahmad Baker