Leave the World Behind plot summary

Clay and Amanda and their two kids have booked a luxurious house in the woods for a family holiday. Enjoying the isolation and the beautiful house, they’re surprised one night by a knock at the door. The house’s owners have arrived. There’s been a blackout. They want to stay. What follows is a claustrophobic exploration of trust and suspicion, safety and disaster, wealth and privilege and the possible end of the world.

My thoughts on Leave the World Behind

Leave the World Behind is a literary thriller (emphasis on the literary) by Rumaan Alam. Thoughtful, slow-paced and disturbingly intimate, it follows a family of four on holiday in a remote rented house. Things get strange when the owners of the house, Ruth and G.H., show up. They explain that there’s been a blackout in the city, and they’re hoping to stay in their house.

Clay and Amanda are confused – why didn’t they just go to their own home? – and a little suspicious – are they even telling the truth? But they don’t turn the couple away. Together, they all wait to find out more about what might be happening out in the rest of the world.

I had real mixed feelings about this book, honestly! There were a lot of techniques at play that I think made for an interesting read. It was definitely an unusual book, which counts for something. But, honestly, it was also pretty hard work.

The narrative style of this book was fascinating

The book had an omniscient third-person narrator, and also made use of free indirect speech. What we got as a result was a combination of the direct thoughts of various characters, observations from the narrator, and information about what was going on further away from the house.

This made for a very particular atmosphere. We hopped from character to character over the course of each scene, seeing what they were thinking and how that matched up to what they were saying. Interspersing the conversations in the house with flashes of what was going on in the nearby city, or the rest of the country.

As the reader, you simultaneously had far more information than any one of the characters, and were just as clueless about what it all meant. That was intriguing.

For me, the narrative style came with some downsides as well though. I wasn’t always totally sure whether thoughts are coming from the narrator or from one of the characters. This bothered me mostly because we didn’t have much to go on when trying to get to know characters. So I wanted to be clear on what thoughts were coming directly from them.

It also killed what I thought was meant to be the main tension of the book. The blurb makes out like this book is a thriller, where you’re trying to figure out whether these newcomers (Ruth and G.H.) are dangerous. Because you can see directly inside their heads from pretty much the moment they turn up, there’s not a lot to figure out here!

In hindsight, this is more than made up for by the tension built up through the situation and environment. But it definitely threw me for a loop at first.

Leave the World Behind is a highly uncomfortable read

There’s absolutely no shying away from physicality in this book. A combination of closely described physical moments, and some peculiarly sexual comparisons, all added to the unsettling intimacy of the story.

It also induces a very particular kind of paranoia – or it did for me, at any rate! Something about the characters’ cluelessness, combined with our slightly more knowledgeable (but grim) perspective, created an atmosphere of vague, formless dread as I was reading. And not just while I was reading either; the feeling hung around for hours after I put the book down. And you have to hand it to a novel that makes you feel anything beyond its own pages.

The book moves… very… slowly…

It doesn’t cover an awfully long time, and I really felt every moment. The constant moving through perspectives over the course of any given conversation also emphasised the slow pace. Some of the scenes with all four adults talking felt interminably long.

There was a lot of repetition in some of the scenes. Characters having the same thoughts over and over, worrying at the same questions – should we leave? Should we go to a doctor? What do we think is going on? Elements like this were things that I think were realistic for the scenario, but that didn’t stop them from being pretty tedious to read.

The characters in Leave the World Behind are plausibly imperfect

I felt pretty indifferent towards the characters for the most part. The narrative style didn’t really encourage investment in any of them. I usually prefer stories with strong characters, so this was a downside for me. And considering I was expecting a character-driven thriller, I was a little disappointed not to have anyone to root for!

The characters were nuanced, often a little petty or selfish or problematic, but basically fine people. For the most part, anyway. At first it was interesting seeing how they responded to the little information they had about what had happened. But since the characters didn’t learn anything new, they were left to rehash the same conversations, and I felt like we stopped getting new insights into them pretty quickly.

The book addressed race and racism, a little, in an indirect sort of way. The couple who shows up, G.H. and Ruth, are Black, and it surprises Amanda and Clay. One of them essentially has the thought that the house doesn’t seem like the sort of place Black people would live – presumably because it’s a very nice house. They think it, and they feel bad for thinking it, and Ruth and G.H. pick up on the awkwardness.

There are some other similar moments to that, but the book doesn’t really go anywhere with them. It points out that people have racist thoughts, and that racism exists, and kind of leaves it there, otherwise unexamined.

In conclusion…

Leave the World Behind was definitely atmospheric, and interesting to read now. I was surprised to go back and find out it wasn’t written during the pandemic! The whole tone of it felt so in line with the vague anxieties of lockdown. But it was also frustrating to read – slow-paced, and it didn’t really go anywhere. However deliberate that might have been, it made for a less enjoyable read for me.

We knew too much about what was going on in the wider world for it to be a mystery, and we knew everything there was to know about the characters from pretty early on. So, the question for me was more about how much the characters would discover of the collapse by the end of the novel.

Without giving anything specific away, this isn’t a book that I’d recommend if you like a strong plot and clear resolutions! It serves to highlight the fact that, faced with the end of the world, most of us wouldn’t do anything about it.