Beautiful World is a lot more structured than its predecessors. No – some things never change.īut some things do. ‘Has she learnt how to use speech marks yet?’ my mum joked. We have the mentally unstable, beautifully fragile brunette with the tall, handsome man, the cyclical miscommunication storyline in which they are both afraid to let the other in, and of course the sparse writing style. Yes, there are still the familiar Rooney tropes here, weighing the book down into predictability. Ultimately, it offers a defence of this behaviour, and thus of itself. It questions the value of spending the majority of our time thinking about our relationships with others – or even in consuming art and media about personal relationships – when there are so many bigger questions and problems to confront.
At times, the narrative offers us multiple possible interpretations for their actions, giving us no clue as to what it believes is the correct one.ĭid Felix find her answers interesting, or was he bored? Was he thinking about her, or about something else, someone else? And onstage, speaking about her books, was Alice thinking about him?īeautiful World is a novel which is as unsure about how its characters feel as it is about whether it should exist, or be read, in a world which often seems far from beautiful. We don’t know what the characters truly feel. Rather than adjectives, we read that Alice gazes around the room ‘as if uninterested’ or speaks ‘as if she were beginning to enjoy herself’. But Beautiful World explores it more explicitly, its prose sweeping camera-like between subjects, narrating their actions with a curious but detached tone. The fact that we can never truly know others is not a new idea in the Rooney universe.
She was twenty-nine years old’ – on and on, about her family, her childhood, her adolescence, her years at college, her career, her friendships and relationships, her secrets, her unhappiness. Then suddenly, all in a rush, we are told ‘her name was Eileen Lyndon. We view ‘a woman’ as she goes about her day – at her job, meeting ‘a man’ for lunch, travelling home to eat leftovers for dinner, scrolling her phone on her bed. Chapter Two of Sally Rooney’s new novel Beautiful World, Where Are You forces us to confront this truth. 4 STARS Sally Rooney, 2021 CONTAINS SPOILERSĮvery person you’ve ever met or seen in the street lives a life as rich and complex as your own.
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