Just Finished Reading: Leave the World Behind by Rumaan Alam (FP: 2020) [241pp] 

It was perfect, the ideal vacation home. Only a few hours' drive from New York but off the beaten track enough to feel like another world. Plus, it had everything there, at your fingertips except for decent phone reception but that could be an advantage too – the office would only be in touch when they drove into ‘town’ a few minutes away. It was the best excuse of being uncontactable. Of course, the kids grumbled a bit being ‘offline’ from their friends, but the pool and the big screen TV helped. Anyway, it was only for a week – they could survive for a week without constant Facebook updates. Barely a day, that’s how long the idyll lasted. Late at night there was an unwelcome and unexpected knock at the door. They almost didn’t answer. Standing there was an old black couple who claimed to be the owners of the Airbnb they were vacationing in. Further they claimed that New York and, by the looks of things, the whole eastern seaboard has had a power failure. They were here to wait things out and see what the problem was. Without their phones, without the Internet and without TV there was no way to know what was happening. Did the old couple really own the expensive house miles from anywhere? Was there really a blackout that wasn’t affecting them personally? But the old couple seemed to know where everything was and even had keys to locked cabinets. Was that enough to trust them and let them stay the night? It wasn’t long before strange things began to happen – deer walking across the lawn seemingly oblivious to the human looking at them in surprised awe, strange weather for the time of year and then there was the loud bang in the sky without a hint of cloud. Was it thunder or a sonic boom? What on earth was going on? 

I’d heard good things about this novel months before I finally got around to reading it. Yet again I’d picked it up soon after it came out because it looked ‘different’ and ‘interesting’. It was certainly that! What made it somewhat more interesting was a question in the ‘hints for reading groups’ at the back suggesting that it would be getting a very different reaction after the pandemic than before, and I could certainly see that. BTW – this isn’t a spoiler. The ‘event’ or events that are in the background are never fully fleshed out or explained – which had both a good side, in that it enhanced the mystery, and a bad side, in that we never really knew what REALLY was going on. Actually, I’m still in two minds about the book in general – despite being very well written – and a technique used throughout of hinting at events that the characters didn’t know about and could never or did never discover as well as hints of events years later that grew out of the BIG event behind the whole book. On one level this was intriguing and left me wanting to know more. On another level it did feel at times that the author was throwing a kitchen sink full of post-apocalyptic ideas on the page hoping that at least some of them would stick with his readers. Again, this is not to say this was a bad or poorly executed book, it wasn’t. I certainly mulled the plot over in my minds for days after reading the last page. The style was interesting – alternatively creepy and mysterious – with more than decent characterisation throughout and believable reactions to the strangeness being experienced. But in some ways, this did feel like half a book – as if the author had a good idea (and it was a good idea) but didn’t know how to or simply didn’t want to get into what I would regard as the meat of the situation. As a character study of how people, and especially strangers thrown together, react to a mysterious event it was very good, but I would’ve liked to see more of the outside world and their reaction to that. But maybe there’s a sequel coming? Recommended with caveats. 

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