But gradually something like clarity emerges, unlike, say, Cormac McCarthy’s opaque greyscale nightmare in The Road. Like many literary apocalypses, Alam is at first coy about what has actually happened. Slowly it becomes clear that something has indeed gone amiss in the world and fear and panic sets in, and they collectively begin to wonder if they are trapped or have successfully evaded some sort of cataclysm. G.H and Ruth insist that they are the owners of the house Amanda and Clay are renting and come bearing ominous news of a blackout in Manhattan. “They were four adults standing about awkwardly as in those last anticipatory moments at an orgy,” Alam writes and you can feel his joy in getting away with it. Which turns out to be all they need to be anyway.īecause their middle class ennui is about to be interrupted, with the arrival one night of an older, rich black couple, Ruth and George (!) “G.

It’s a problem with all the characters to some extent, making them like those outlines of humans used for target practice. “She wore her hair neither short nor long … knew that she looked like the sort of woman she was … wrapped her hair into a white towel like a woman in a certain kind of film”, descriptions that make her more cypher than flesh and blood. He wanders around the house admiring the furnishings: “marble countertops and Miele washer and Clay had a full erection”. Clay is a man who furtively smokes, despite giving it up, in the belief that “smoking was a patriotic act … like killing the Cherokee or keeping slaves”. They idle away the time, at the beach, lounging by the pool, admiring the pornographic verdure of the woods, and having banal middle class epiphanies like “vacation made you horny” and “vacation was for being returned to your body”.Īlam is having a lot of fun in these early chapters, particularly with his characterisations. “Step into our beautiful house and leave the world behind,” the advert invites, an invite that they may come to wish they’d rejected. Parents Amanda, an account director, and Clay, a writer and professor, and children fifteen-year-old Archie and twelve-year-old Rose rent an Airbnb. A white middle class New York family heads into the Long Island woods for summer vacation and the world ends in Rumaan Alam’s gleefully silly and mostly gripping apocalyptic horror-comedy.

Review of leave the world behind