If there is one formal feature that is almost universally associated with the realist novel in the nineteenth-century tradition, it is the so-called omniscient narrator. In this way, Leave the World Behind demonstrates the realist novel’s ability to open itself up to the weird realities of the climate crisis. Omniscience is thus used to undermine the possibility of affirming human mastery and control over the unsettling events that are playing out in the storyworld. In my case study, Rumaan Alam’s 2020 novel Leave the World Behind, the narrator’s apparent omniscience stages the uncertainties of our climate future through an ironic device: knowledge of the catastrophe experienced by the characters is displayed but also withheld from the reader, leading to an ambivalent, and largely unreadable, narratorial stance. As the future becomes fragmented in a multiplicity of alternative scenarios (ranging from local disasters to societal collapse), personal and collective anxieties come to the fore.
In this article, I explore how a centerpiece of nineteenth-century realist fiction, the omniscient narrator, may be reimagined to speak to the imaginative challenges of climate change.
Leave the World Behind explores how our closest bonds are reshaped in moments of crisis - and how the most terrifying situations are never far from reality.Scholars in ecocriticism have frequently argued that the environmental crisis calls for an overhaul of the realist novel, which is inadequate at conveying the global scale and ramifications of climate change and related anthropogenic disruptions to the Earth system. Should Amanda and Clay trust this couple - and vice versa? What has happened back in New York? Is the holiday home, isolated from civilisation, a truly safe place for their families? And are they safe from one another? An impossibly compelling literary thriller about the world we live in now, Rumaan Alam's novel is keenly attuned to the complexities of parenthood, race and class. But with the TV and internet down, and no phone service, the facts are unknowable. These strangers say that a sudden power outage has swept the city, and - with nowhere else to turn - they have come to the country in search of shelter.
H., an older couple who claim to own the home, have arrived there in a panic. But with a late-night knock on the door, the spell is broken.
Amanda and Clay head to a remote corner of Long Island expecting a holiday: a quiet reprieve from life in New York City, quality time with their teenage son and daughter and a taste of the good life in the luxurious home they've rented for the week. Waterstones Fiction Book of the Month for June 2021 Shortlisted for the Orwell Prize for Political Fiction 2021 A magnetic novel about two families, strangers to each other, who are forced together on a long weekend gone terribly wrong.
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