Silverview + Beautiful World, Where Are You

Some of you know that I co-host a books podcast called The Lit Pickers (we just finished our second season. Much fun). On the podcast, we did a “minisode” (mini + episode) on bookmarks a few weeks ago, listing all the things we’ve used to mark the spot in a book. Unfortunately, we recorded that episode before I had the brainwave that resulted in this genius move.

That thing sticking out at the top is purportedly a knife, made of wood. As knives go, it is an epic failure because despite the ridges on its business end, that knife can cut exactly nothing. However, as a bookmark, it is excellent. It marks a spot without affecting the binding. You can even position it so that the bottom of the knife is at the line/ paragraph from where you’ll pick up the book when you return to it. Also, a knife as a bookmark for a spy novel feels perfect (even though John le Carré didn’t write the kind of stories in which knives would have much to do).

Silverview is John le Carré’s last novel. He died last year, aged 89, leaving behind a full-length novel among his papers. Which is exactly what you’d expect from someone who took great pride in being a working author of commercial fiction and who had a new book every few years ever since his first novel was published in 1961. I hope and pray I don’t live to be in my late 80s, but if that’s what lies ahead, I’d be happy if I was able to come up with a story even half as complex as the plot of Silverview.

Ex-banker Julian has decided to abandon London and retire to a small town in East Anglia, where he’s set up a bookshop. Enter Edward Avon, who is “mad as a flute”, claims to be a childhood friend of Julian’s and buys nothing, but fills the younger man’s head with dreams. Charming as Edward is, there’s something about him that feels odd to Julian. He starts asking around and learns that Edward is married to the owner of a nearby estate called Silverview. He’s also been selling off his wife’s heirloom porcelain collection. Elsewhere, Stewart Proctor, head of domestic security for the British intelligence service, is tasked with investigating a leak of classified information. The source of the leak: Silverview. Needless to say, these two strands are entangled.

Years ago, le Carré had written an essay on his father, who was a con artist extraordinaire, a wife-beater and a generally awful father who nevertheless seemed to be a charmer. Not just because he won over everyone from convicts to prime ministers, but because even le Carré remained fascinated by his father despite the animosity between them. After having spent years destroying his father’s letters and distancing himself from the older man, at one point le Carré hired two detectives to unearth information about his father and said this to them:

“I’m a liar, I explained. Born to lying, bred to it, trained to it by an industry that lies for a living, practiced in it as a novelist. As a maker of fictions, I invent versions of myself, never the real thing, if it exists. So what I’ll do is this, I said. I’ll let my imaginative memory rip on the left-hand page, and I’ll put your factual record on the right-hand page, unchanged and unadorned. And in that way my readers will see for themselves to what extent an old writer’s memory is the whore of his imagination. We all reinvent our pasts, I said, but writers are in a class of their own. Even when they know the truth, it’s never enough for them.”

Reading Silverview, I found myself remembering this passage and wondering whether there wasn’t a little of le Carré himself in Edward Avon, who is a teller of tales, a disillusioned survivor and a peddler of the past. If that is the case, perhaps we can forgive le Carré for ending Edward Avon’s story in a way that feels incredible and too damn convenient. It is perhaps a bit of grace that readers can offer le Carré if Edward Avon was indeed a version of himself invented at the end of his life.

Silverview begins powerfully and ends disappointingly. Not all the loose ends are tied up and some of the plot ‘twists’ are banal (like the love story between Julian and Edward’s daughter, Lily). Few of the women feel rounded as characters and the ones who occupy most page space exist only to serve the dramatic arc of le Carré’s heroes. Still, for all its flaws, Silverview is a really good read and if this is the first le Carré novel you read, it may not be a bad introduction. Partly because Silverview does explore a lot of le Carré’s favourite issues (like loyalty, for instance) and also because there are fragments of writing in this novel that are dazzling in their brilliance, like the chapter in which Proctor interrogates two former secret service officers.

Also, while it does stretch credibility at times, Silverview isn’t ever simplistic. Even at age 89, le Carré didn’t give in to the urge of writing a story in which people, their motivations and their actions can be neatly categorised as “good” and “bad”. Given how so many entertainment cultures today see spy stories as exercises of patriotic chest-thumping, le Carré’s self-aware, exhausted but duty-bound intelligence officers feel like a much-needed counterpoint. “We didn’t do much to alter the course of human history, did we?,” says a former colleague to Proctor at one point. In a world full of spies who save the world and look smug at the end of their adventures, le Carré’s quiet, introspective chaps are strangely heartwarming.

I don’t recall exactly when I first saw Sally Rooney’s new novel was titled Beautiful World, Where Are You, but I do remember growling at the absence of the question mark in the title.

Sometimes, there are multiple choices when it comes to a phrase. “Beautiful world, where are you” isn’t one of those phrases.

Still, one shouldn’t judge a book by its title and so, I started reading Beautiful World. A few chapters in, the desire to throttle all those people who wrote gushing reviews of the novel (as well as myself for falling for the temptation dangled by those reviews) surged through me. Not because Beautiful World is awful, but because this is a seriously overhyped book.

Rooney’s new novel is strictly ok and more than a little bit self-indulgent. Her protagonist is a young-ish celebrity novelist who teeters between being amused and appalled at the amount of money and attention she receives, while swanning around the world to talk about her books. Obviously you’re supposed to see glimpses Rooney in this character, especially since her emails read like they’re mouthpieces for Rooney as she addresses critics who have complained her writing is overly sentimental and lacks political/ intellectual heft. On the plus side, unlike the fictional celebrity novelist, Rooney is not dating a manipulative and abusive man named Felix. (Last year, Rooney married her long-time partner John Prasifka, who is a maths teacher. Cheers to them.)

But I’m getting ahead of myself.

Rooney is a superstar because — as any article that you read about her will tell you — she’s written works of literary fiction that have crossed over into the mainstream. Three books old, Rooney is practically a brand name now and her books are as popular as genre fiction. Which really makes you wonder: what makes a book literary fiction in the first place?

Beautiful World has a chick lit plot that’s been stripped of wit and drama; slowed down by unnecessary descriptive details; and given intellectual heft through passages about ethics and art. Unlike good chick lit, Beautiful World is forgettable. I’m writing this just weeks after finishing the novel, and I confess, I had to go to Goodreads to remind myself what had happened in it.

(I still don’t remember exactly what happened towards the end.)

(I’m also a bit blurry about the middle.)

Beautiful World opens with literary superstar Alice on a Tinder date with warehouse worker Felix, who tells her bluntly that he has no intention of reading her novels. That’s Couple No. 1. Those looking for sociological depth from Rooney, please note Alice’s quiet fascination for this working class man. For reasons best known to Alice, she tells Felix about the remote cottage she’s renting, which immediately reminded me of West Cork (superb podcast. Muchly recommend it over the Netflix series on the same case). However, since this is a literary romance, we don’t have to worry about Alice’s physical wellbeing (her mental wellbeing, on the other hand, is a definite cause for concern).

Couple No. 2 comprises Eileen and Simon. Simon is handsome, wealthy, and has a thing for dating significantly younger women and not having condoms at hand when he needs them. Eileen works a dead-end job at a literary magazine, is a bundle of insecurities and when she isn’t stalking her ex-boyfriend on social media, she’s writing essay-length emails to Alice. Alice and Eileen geeking out about writing, the collapse of civilisations, the ethics of art, philosophy, capitalism et al make for some of the most engaging parts of Beautiful World. In case you were wondering, it’s not as though the two women haven’t heard of texting (they text their boyfriends on repeated occasions) so it seems the decision to communicate by email is conscious and deliberate. No doubt this is supposed to signal that they’re quirky.

So in Couple No. 1, we have the successful, urbane woman who finds herself drawn to the somewhat uncouth son of the soil while Couple No. 2 are made up of the suave posh man and the mousy (but actually beautiful), overworked assistant. Either to help the reader immerse themselves into Beautiful World or to distract us from how these characters are chick lit stereotypes, Rooney bombards the reader with descriptions that are dense and detailed. Here’s an example:

“Using the soft greasy roller on her computer mouse she skimmed over the document, eyes flicking back and forth across narrow columns of text, and occasionally she stopped, clicked, and inserted or deleted characters.”

All of which could have been communicated with, “Eileen sat down to edit an article.” The problem isn’t just Rooney’s wordiness, but that her descriptions feel like notes for actors who will perform her novel, rather than integral to the novel itself or the reading experience. If Rooney wasn’t already a wildly successful and celebrated author, you’d be forgiven for thinking Beautiful World is written by someone who was being paid per word (which would be better than some of the “deals” that Indian publishers have offered novelists in the past year, but that’s a different matter entirely).

From what I remember of Beautiful World, there are some interesting ideas buried under the slag heap of descriptions, but the novel’s flaws made more of an impression on me. As a set of love stories, Beautiful World failed because neither did I get a sense of the two women’s personalities nor were the two love interests particularly desirable. Simon is boring, wishy washy and I may have thrown up in my mouth when Rooney implied having sex without a condom is peak romance. Felix is frequently cruel; easily admits to having lied to a girl in order to convince her to have sex with him; and has pulled a Roman Polanski in the past. Yup, the working class ‘hero’ is written as exploitative rather than exploited by an author who is a self-professed Marxist.

Aside from the novel-length effort to romanticise internalised misogyny, there’s a clinical quality to the tone Rooney adopts as the third-person narrator of Beautiful World that keeps the reader at a distance from the characters. The net result is a set of flat characters who don’t feel dynamic or alive — not even when they’re having sex or suffering a breakdown. For instance, I shouldn’t have needed a Goodreads review to remind me Alice had been hospitalised because of her floundering mental health before she decided to hole up in the Irish countryside.

Rooney’s writing allows the reader to glimpse the internal life of her characters only in the emails Alice and Eileen exchange, and in a wedding scene towards the end of the novel. The latter is a fantastic bit of writing. Rooney’s third-person narrator slips in and out of different characters’ perspectives, and the effect is electric. That scene is a masterful reminder of just how gifted a storyteller Rooney is.

Towards the end of the novel, in an email written by either Alice or Eileen (I got the quote from Goodreads. Mea culpa), there’s passage that seems like Rooney’s defence for the worlds and people she creates in her fiction:

“Maybe we’re just born to love and worry about the people we know, and to go on loving and worrying even when there are more important things we should be doing. And if that means the human species is going to die out, isn’t it in a way a nice reason to die out, the nicest reason you can imagine? Because when we should have been reorganising the distribution of the world’s resources and transitioning collectively to a sustainable economic model, we were worrying about sex and friendship instead.”

Except socio-economic inequalities don’t exist on a different plane. They inform sex and friendship in subtle and sometimes not-so-subtle ways. They are almost always reflected in the ways we’re able to love the people we do, and the way we fail or succeed. Wittingly or unwittingly, the forces that tear the real world apart are always embedded in the stories we tell. Which is why readers should notice that Rooney writes of a world where there are only white people; where misogynistic abuses of power are considered romantic; and where critical thinking by women is dismissed as an aside to prioritise being in love with domineering men.

I hope you’re all doing well and that November is kinder to you than the rest of the year has been.

Thank you for reading. Dear Reader will be back soon.