Book Club Review: Leave the World Behind

RAD Book Club’s first read of the year was Leave the World Behind, the 2020 novel by the American novelist, Rumaan Alam, which was recently adapted into a Netflix film by Sam Esmail, starring Julia Roberts, Mahershala Ali, Ethan Hawke, and Myha’la. A dark, apocalyptic thriller that echoes Jordan Peele’s Us and Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, Leave the World Behind follows a white, well-off New York family on a Long Island holiday that goes disastrously wrong.

After a few blissful days in the holiday home, two people claiming to be the owners of the property arrive unexpectedly and ask to stay, explaining there’s been a blackout in the city and there’s nowhere else for them to go. From there, things unravel spectacularly, as tensions rise and explanations for the increasingly strange occurrences that befall them are few and far between. The phones and internet are down, animals are behaving strangely, and the sky is filled with the sounds of planes and warfare. Praised as “smart, gripping and hallucinatory” by The Guardian, Leave the World Behind is a jumpy, dread-drenched novel that “taps brilliantly into the feeling of generalised panic that has attached itself to the [coronavirus] and seems to mingle fears about the climate, inequality, racism and our over-reliance on technology.”

The group’s opinion was pretty evenly divided on the book, with some of us really enjoying it and others finding it to be a mixed bag. Those of us that enjoyed it found it to be an immersive, sometimes terrifying reading experience. They thought it was a well-executed horror novel and they enjoyed its take on the apocalypse or disaster genre. They also found the imagery evocative and the narrative voice compelling, particularly in the moments where the novel zoomed out to narrate the wider disaster unfolding across America.

However, other members of the group disliked the writing style, finding it overwrought, a little silly and not containing much horror. Some took issue with the novel’s plot, describing it as vague and uneven and at times baffling, while others disliked the novel’s main characters, finding them unlikeable and uninteresting.

They did, however, prefer the book to the movie, which they thought was overly-long and derivative. They also stated that they enjoyed the book more once they’d watched the film, as the film erased a lot of the book’s ambiguity and they thought that it was poorer for it.

Overall we had mixed feelings about the book, with some of us really loving it and some of us feeling mostly ambivalent about it. Our average rating of Leave the World Behind was 7/10.

Book Club will meet again on Thursday the 29th of February 2024 at 13:15-14:00 in the Library