Out today: Everything you need to know about Sally Rooney's 'Beautiful World, Where Are You'
Beautiful World, Where Are You, by Sally Rooney, also author of Conversations With Friends, and Normal People. Picture: Kalpesh Lathigra
The title derives from a poem by German writer Friedrich Schiller, which was written in 1788, and reflects on a world beset by huge uncertainty, which has obvious resonances for today.
Rooney’s much-anticipated third book centres on the friendship between two best friends — Alice, a successful author and Eileen, an assistant at a literary magazine, and their respective romantic relationships with Felix, a warehouse worker and Simon, a policy adviser. Rooney, who recently turned 30 herself, adeptly captures the gap between the expectations of the characters in their 20s and the reality of their impending 30s, when the exciting promise and possibility of youth begin to fade.
As launch day has approached, it's become apparent that bookshops will be thronged, with Irish outlets bracing for a busy day between retail and record orders - while in the UK, publisher Faber has set up a pop-up shop in London specifically for the book following a long queue at its launch event.
Rooney has been vocal in recent interviews about the challenges that come with fame. The marketing campaign and fan frenzy accompanying the book — advance copies of which have reportedly been changing hands for hundreds of dollars online — has hardly helped with the Irish author’s aversion to attention. The real-life parallels are obvious — Alice is holed up in the west of Ireland trying to write her third book (Rooney returned to her home county of Mayo during lockdown) and Eileen is working at a literary magazine in Dublin (Rooney is a former editor of The Stinging Fly journal, in which she had poems published while still at school).
The characters in Beautiful World are not a million miles removed from those in her previous books, but at a different stage in their lives. Rooney’s debut novel, Conversations with Friends, released only four years ago, also followed the stories of best friends — Trinity students Frances, another young writer, and Bobbi. In Normal People, Rooney created Marianne and Connell, two of the most memorable characters in recent fiction, who attend the same school and go on to Trinity together. The settings of Dublin, Italy and the west of Ireland in this book and the themes around relationships will be familiar but Trinity takes a back seat. While it is hard to know if Rooney was being serious when she described herself in a Vogue interview as “imaginatively limited” it would be interesting to see her move beyond the similar characters, themes and milieu of her first three books.
Reading Beautiful World, Where are You, one can’t help but feel Rooney is using the opportunity to get a few things off her chest and also indulge in some literary trolling of her detractors. There is no doubt the knives are sharpened in certain quarters this time out — in fact, in one of the many examples that reads like auto-fiction, Rooney anticipates the backlash, writing about Alice’s first book: “A lot of press attention surrounded the publication, mostly positive at first, and then some negative pieces reacting to the fawning positivity of the initial coverage.”
Sex scenes can challenge even the best of writers, but once again, Rooney strikes the right note in her portrayal of intimate scenes, and, as in her previous books, it is refreshing to see issues like consent and the proliferation of porn so well-handled.
It’s all subjective but overall, this was my least favourite of her three novels. While Rooney does not go in for high-stakes drama, Beautiful World lacks the subtle pull that kept me turning the pages of the previous two books and the characters don’t convince in the same way. The chapters which follow the daily lives of Alice and Eileen are interspersed with long discursive emails between the two, one would imagine a rare enough means of corresponding among the average twenty-something these days. Reading at times like treatises on subjects from class and religion to the value of art and whether to procreate in a time of impending apocalypse — whether one finds these epistolary interludes profound and philosophical or pompous and preachy, the overall effect is to drag the narrative thrust of the novel as a whole.
Rooney is gifted with the ability to weave an exquisite turn of phrase and there were many times that certain lines stopped me in my tracks. Ultimately, however, I wanted to like this book more than I actually did — if only to counteract the tall poppy effect that has seen Rooney accused of such ridiculous perceived misdemeanours as her characters drinking too much tea.
The TV adaptation of Normal People from Irish director Lenny Abrahamson became a lockdown phenomenon, burnishing the reputation of the book even further, and minting two stars in Paul Mescal and Daisy Edgar-Jones. Conversations with Friends, once again featuring a strong line-up of young talent, including Cork actor Alison Oliver, is currently filming in Ireland and, with the steady hand of Abrahamson guiding this adaptation once again, it is likely to be another Rooney hit. It remains to be seen if Beautiful World, which doesn’t have the immediate emotional power of her first two books, gets the same treatment but one thing is for sure, the spotlight on Rooney herself won’t be fading any time soon.
- Beautiful World, Where are You is published on Tuesday, September 7, by Faber & Faber
