By – Rumaan Alam
Leave the world behind terrified me. Not like a horror novel or a supernatural novel. It terrified me since it took the characters from a calm ordinary life to a completely changed life yet they didn’t have the foggiest idea what had caused the change and what was happening on the planet.
Leave the world behind is a superb novel about the apocalypse. For me probably the weird time to read a novel about the apocalypse or say the end of the world. In Manhattan nearly however not-exactly power couple leases a lavish home close to the Hamptons for their vacation. On the third day, late night, an old Black couple appears at the house, professing to be its proprietors, claiming that something has occurred in the city. Is the world ending?
The story in Leave the world behind is about how human civilization falls away, and it starts with a careful accounting of a standard family in its last minutes: the teenaged kids spellbound by their telephones “like a bulbous flute mesmerizes a cobra”, the mother doing a staple run, with an exceptionally point by point rundown of each and every thing she purchased (riveting on the grounds that you by one way or another realize you are watching the last demonstrations of an old world, so everything matters), a (last, however they don’t have any acquaintance with it) day at the beach. All is great. But, IS everything fine? Covered in the sentences, references to a worldwide temperature alteration, flighty financial exchanges, disturbed democracy, a warning that it was NOT all fine, they were simply pretending it was, until they couldn’t pretend any more.
It is splendidly written. I read it in under a day – simple, because it’s short. It reads like a super-abstract adaptation of the initial 75 pages of the Stand, time directly as the infection starts. The all-knowing portrayal is an expert class; the characters are totally in the dark about what’s going on, yet the storyteller drops in little references to what exactly is happening to people in a lift, under a passage, in their fifteenth floor lofts in Manhattan.
Close to the end of the novel, which doesn’t peak to such an extent as it simply kind of winds down (like life itself), there were alarms outside my house, and my dog was scratching herself, and it was all somewhat excessively strange and insane and odd. Anyway. Is the world ending? Would you like to understand what it will feel like, on the off chance that you do? read Leave the world behind.
