Sally Rooney, Beautiful World, Where Are You.

 

- As a fan of Sally Rooney's two previous novels, Normal People and Conversations With Friends, I wanted this one to be good. Well, as it turns out, it's not just good but absolutely brilliant. By far her best yet. 

- Right from the get-go the characters are attractive and immensely likeable. Eileen spends her working day as a literary magazine editor, ‘moving commas around’ as she says. And of course she's woefully underpaid. Alice is a very successful young author whose royalty advances have made her quite financially well off. (Hello Sally?). She's in high demand for interviews and conferences, and all the other publicity gumph of the publishing world. Both young women are highly intelligent and physically attractive. Like Marianne from Normal People, and Frances and Bobbi from Conversations with Friends they will stick in your mind and stay with you. But they have issues.

- Rooney’s familiar terrain is young friends and young students navigating relationships and sex. Their love lives and often transient relationships are central. Beautiful World is no different, but in this one serious and unresolved tensions emerge that are very destabilising. And it’s far more erotic too, the sex scenes described in more detail and with more intensity. The characters are more adult and mature, now in their thirties. 

- What gives this novel enormous power is that Rooney moves well beyond personal relationships. She’s venturing into philosophical and political realms. As much as anything it’s a novel of ideas - religion, marriage, beauty, morality, creativity, inequality, communism, climate, and others. The book is extraordinarily rich in insight and observation. As Eileen writes at one point, perhaps vocalising Rooney’s own artistic ambitions: Because when we should have been reorganising the distribution of the world’s resources and transitioning collectively to a sustainable economic model, we were worrying about sex and friendship instead. Because we loved each other too much and found each other too interesting.

- Alice and Eileen write long emails to each other addressing all these issues in depth. It's almost as if Rooney is interrogating herself. They are akin to essayistic explorations of life in contemporary times, passionate and personal and brilliant. Alice's reflections on the publishing industry and pretentious other authors who are constantly ‘complaining about bad reviews’ are delicious. They even dissect the Late Bronze Age and the reasons for its demise. So not all fans of Rooney will like this aspect. They’ll be way too challenged intellectually. But Rooney has risen to a whole new level of accomplishment.