KOCHI: Sally Rooney’s ‘Beautiful World, Where Are You’ has many quintessential Rooney experiments. The Irish millennial author criticised for being a Marxist in real life and not enough in her books has found an outlet for all her frustrations — her characters and their many email conversations. The story revolves around four people who worry about a world falling apart in front of them and the many absurdities of human ambitions.
Alice Kelleher, a bestselling novelist. The book opens with an impassioned third-person narrative of a tinder date between Alice and Felix, a warehouse worker. The email exchange between Alice and her long-time friend Eileen, an editorial assistant in Dublin, reveals this chemistry. Eileen is in an on-off sexual relationship with her childhood crush and friend Simon.They fill the pages of the Beautiful World, Where Are You.
The email exchanges between Alice and Eileen discusses everything under the sky — marxism, capitalism, human emotions, sexuality, and breakups. They never meet until the end of the novel, where everyone waits for something momentous to happen. For a long while, the morbid beauty of Rooney’s prose makes everyone forgets the mundane things like plot or the conflict, which is not revealed until the last pages of the book.
The emails reveal only part of their relationship and it’s more about their thoughts and introspection that sometimes involve men. Simon is a pacifier, a normal nice guy who never breaks his strong charisma. Felix is a trouble maker with prodding questions and is struggling with his mother’s death. He is bisexual, so is Alice. But Rooney never paints a complete picture of their sexuality.
This is a story about Marxism, friendship, sex, love and human connections in the time of the pandemic. The characters resolve their simple conflicts in life and finding love and family, while the readers eagerly flip the page to see what happens next.
FROM THE BOOK
The present has become discontinuous. Each day, even each hour of each day replaces and makes irrelevant the time before, and the events of our lives make sense only in relation to a perpetually updating timeline of news content.