Scala Radio Book Club: Leave the World Behind by Rumaan Alam
Last updated 28th Jun 2021
Simon Mayo’s Scala Radio Book Club guest on Thursday 19th November was the author Rumaan Alam, who spoke to Simon from New York about his new book, Leave the World Behind, a literary thriller about two families, who are forced together.
‘The novel begins as a story of a family of four on vacation,’ revealed Alam. ‘We meet them as they're heading out to a remote part of Long Island for a week-long holiday. They're just planning on swimming in the pool and taking day trips to the beach and cooking out as you do on your summer holiday when we're not amidst a pandemic. On the second night of their stay, there's a knock at the door, they open the door to encounter an older black couple who tell them that this is their house. They're the owners who have rented them via Airbnb, and they've fled there because of an emergency unfolding in New York City.’
Leave the World Behind was written before the COVID pandemic, and yet it taps into many issues that have been experienced around the world in 2020. ‘What begins as a book about four people, delightedly losing themselves inside of a remote house, transforms into a story about six people who are trapped inside of a remote house trying to figure out what's happening in the world outside of the walls.’
‘We know more than they do,’ Simon observed. ‘And the thing that's going on is bad, isn't it?’
‘The book declines to answer or clarify exactly what's happening outside of the house,’ explains Alam. ‘And I have to say that I don't have a firm grasp on it. Because what's interesting to me about the story is not necessarily the external pressures. It's how the people inside the story respond to them. What's interesting is maybe not the emergency unfolding, but the interest is in the human how humans deal with it.’
Explaining more about why he used detailed shopping lists throughout his book, Alam explained how it is his way of detailing his characters' identities. ‘There are more ways than one to tell you the story of who a person is and what we consume. In this culture, both in terms of our capital, but then in terms of the food and drink that we take bodies, is part of the story of who we are, and establishes a sense of this person.'
‘You have written a book about six people who are trapped in a house at a time when a lot of people out there so they're trapped in a house that makes you Mr Zeitgeist’ Simon observed.
‘I think that we had the opportunity to see that play out in this country in February and March,’ explains Alam. ‘Where the response to the government instituting a lockdown was to make sourdough there's a big Vogue for sourdough bread or to perfect your cakes, or whatever it was that you did to cope. I understand that, what do you do with that feeling of powerlessness and fear? You retreat to the real comforts of domesticity.
‘These are people, fictional people, but people with money and comfort and a home, and it's quite a nice home with that. So it makes sense to me that their response to this uncertain moment would be to enjoy their vacation, strangely, to finish the vacation.’
The piece of music Alam chose was Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake. ‘This is a piece I mentioned in the context of the book when one of the characters Ruth, who is the Black homeowner, is trying to think of an experience. I think she's in a moment of fear, and she's trying to remember something worth living for.
‘This is just an extraordinary piece of music. I think Tchaikovsky is a beautiful composer. But I think so much of his work, is just totally unashamed of its interest in beauty. It runs straight towards being beautiful. So when I hear this, and I listen to Swan Lake quite a bit when I write, that's what I think of. I always stop when it gets to this point. And I just think about how beautiful it is.’
Buy a copy of Leave the World Behind by Rumaan Alam here.
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