Leave the World Behind (2020)
Rumaan Alam (1977)
242 pages
everything [had] held together by tacit agreement that it would. All it took to unravel something was one party deciding to do just that. There was no real structure to prevent chaos, there was only a collective faith in order. (62)
The story opens with Amanda and Clay driving out to the far end of Long Island with their two teenage children for vacation. Their Airbnb rental, a beautiful house nestled deep in the countryside, lies beyond the reach of cell phone service, but does have a Wi-Fi connection to keep the TV and everyone’s phones linked to the outside world. An outdoor pool and hot tub, beautifully situated between the house and the surrounding woods, beckon to the family after the long car ride, and they quickly settle in for a relaxing time away from their busy New York City lives.
Just a day in, however, a late-night knock disrupts the family’s newfound tranquility: at the door are GH and Ruth, who claim to be the owners. They say they’ve come from the city because of a blackout that occurred as they were returning home from the symphony. Not wanting to return to their fourteenth-floor apartment in a city that had descended into darkness, they had decided to drive directly to their country home, hoping their renters would allow them to stay until things returned to normal; once Amanda and Clay establish that the couple are indeed the home’s owners, they have little option but to invite them in.
Though the lights somehow remain on at the home, all connection to the outside world has been lost, with only a last notification on Amanda’s cell phone hinting at the broad extent of the blackout. The remainder of the story plays out over just the next day and a half, with time crawling by for the characters as a sequence of odd events and a lack of concrete information leave them swinging wildly between crippling panic attacks and irrational hopes. It is these last, in fact, that seem most disturbing, persuasively validating an aphorism I once heard that hope is the last resort of fools and dreamers. For, even as inexplicable but increasingly terrifying events accumulate, the powerful illusion of the structure of civilization as indestructible profoundly colors the thinking and decision-making of the characters, slowing their acceptance of both the new order that has descended out over the horizon, and its ramifications for their immediate circumstances and actions.
It is the power of this illusion of civilization’s stability that Alam explores through his characters to devastating effect. By leaving unclarified the details of events in the outside world, the focus becomes on their reactions, individually and collectively, to the situation. Facing an unknown disaster, of proportions and implications they cannot bring themselves to take seriously, they struggle to give up their profound belief that civilization – and their lives as they have known them – will not soon resume again, just as they had left them.
Alam’s portrayal of his characters’ inability to contemplate the end of the kind of lives and world they have known seems frighteningly convincing. Those caught in the chaos of the city would surely be quickly disabused of any belief in the imminent return of stability; but for those isolated and uncertain of what is happening, he paints a persuasive picture of the powerful allure of baseless hopes and wishful thinking.
As readers, we are only given a bit more clarity than the characters about what has befallen the world beyond this house at the isolated tip of Long Island; Alam provides cryptic hints of distant crises, but also alternative scenarios that could be playing out. By not providing a specific, detailed account of the slide toward apocalypse that the world undergoes, he not only keeps our focus on and identification with the experience and reactions of his characters, but also precludes us from dismissing the global events with an oh, that could never happen wave of the hand. Instead, he forces readers to confront the possibility that some combination of accidents and misunderstandings, of mistakes made and risks taken, could all too easily slip our world over into an accelerating descent into disarray – that, as one character concludes, the world truly has “no real structure to prevent chaos,” as one character concludes.
I’ve read commentary that suggests that the significant rise in popularity over the last decade of apocalyptic and dystopian fiction, such as Alam’s novel, represents a reaction to feelings that the world is beset by too many problems, that the future is bleak. The implication has sometimes been that this is simply a phase that populations have historically sometimes gone through; I wonder, however, if such a dismissal isn’t really a bit of a failure of imagination.
To think in the year 999, in Europe, that the world would end on New Year’s Eve clearly seems a parochial vision built on feverish beliefs. Today, however, with our world so deeply interconnected economically and socially, and weapons of tremendous power distributed so widely, is it not a concrete possibility that some relatively small combination of mistakes and misunderstandings could run civilization off the rails? Not, perhaps, in an existential sense, but in the sense of extensively disrupting the lives we – particularly in the developed world – are accustomed to today?
Though Alam captures perfectly the emotional rollercoaster his characters experience, and I find his (admittedly cryptically described) descent of the world into chaos all too plausible, there are inconsistencies in the story that stand out. One is the timing of the arrival of GH and Ruth; based on their description of events, they left New York City after the black-out hit, and drove at least a few hours from the Bronx out to the end of Long Island – and yet, just moments before they knock on the door, Clay had been watching TV, including “pausing a moment on Rachel Maddow” (31), without having seen anything about the largest city in the country suffering a black-out. Another oddity is that although the characters, desperate for news, stare obsessively at their unresponsive phones and keep turning on the TV to verify the blue screen of no-signal, no one ever tries a radio, the seemingly most likely source of information in an emergency.
These quibbles aside, however, Alam has created a captivating story in Leave the World Behind, convincingly portraying the mounting fears the characters experience in the face of profound uncertainty of what is happening in the outside world. Isolated from much of what is familiar to them and forced together with people they first met only hours before, they struggle not only to react appropriately to the deepening threat, but also to shake their desperately held belief that all will inevitably return to normal.
Have you read this book, others by this author, or even similar ones by other authors? I’d enjoy hearing your thoughts.
Other of my book reviews: FICTION Bookshelf and NON-FICTION Bookshelf
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