Beautiful World, Where Are You by Sally Rooney

Over the weekend I finished 'Beautiful world, where are you' by Sally Rooney. A few years ago I read a fine short story she wrote in the Irish Times, but with all the hype about her since Normal People was televised I thought it was about time I read one of her novels. Well reader, I found it to be a strangely complex and unsatisfying experience. But that might be exactly what she was aiming for. 

For me, the first three quarters of the book are a bit cold and lifeless. The interactions of the four principal characters are stilted, all manners and pose. Their conversations never seem to get to a point, very little that they're saying seems authentic or of any real consequence. Their sexual relations are detailed explicitly but are self-conscious and, dare I say, passionless. In their emails to each other the characters of Eileen and Alice adopt  intellectual personae to pontificate about politics and culture, each seeking to impress the other in an earnest and writerly way, and neither trying to read deeply what the other is saying. The narrator's perspective moves in and out, sometimes intensely close to the thoughts and feelings of the characters, sometime floating far about them and puzzling about what they are thinking, just like the reader is. That seems intentionally cinematographic, like Rooney was already thinking about how this could be filmed. But her mastery of the building blocks of the novel is evident, there is real skill on display here. to the point where I feel she must be deliberately making a point of highlighting the narrative technique rather than the characters.  

And then at about the three-quarters point the four characters come together to share a house for a few days and the story finally grips and we see the emotions come to the fore. Each of them is flawed, and none of them is particularly likeable. But this part is compelling, and as I read it I thought that Rooney had been using the first three quarters as a set up just to emphasize the impact of these moments when the characters reveal themselves. And if that was her plan, well, it worked very well. But just as I was ready to say that this was a great novel, the last two chapters bring us back again into an email exchange, and we're back to that shiny surface that occludes the interior.

At the end I feel this is not a great novel but a very clever one, and that Rooney is in some way challenging her readers, testing what she can get away with. I admire what she has done, but can't say I really loved it. Frankly I got a bit bored with it and rushed to finish it because I didn't care about any of these characters at all. But the author's skill is undeniable and I'm really curious about what she'll produce next.