While Alice proposes God as ‘a good option when it comes to putting something at the center of life’, she describes herself as living in a ‘philosophical nowhere place, lacking the courage of convictions on both sides’. It is so winsome that Eileen asks Alice, ‘how is it possible for me to admire someone for believing something I don’t believe and don’t want to believe, and which I think is manifestly incorrect and absurd?’ Overwhelmed by the demands of her writing career, Alice turns to the Bible for comfort during a mental health crisis and is ‘fascinated by the personality of Jesus in a sentimental way’.
His faith in Jesus is described as a ‘friend-to-the-poor, champion-of-the-marginalized kind of thing’. Simon works as an advisor to a left-wing parliamentary group, cohabits with women, and goes to mass every Sunday. Here, Rooney introduces her first ‘low key’ Catholic character, Simon: Eileen’s attractive love interest who models a progressive form of faith. Friedrich Schiller’s poem, ‘The Gods of Greece’, which inspired the title, laments the loss of spring, imagining a winter landscape where ‘no god reveals himself’. Following the interwoven lives of friends Eileen, Alice, Simon, and Felix, the novel can be read as a long string of questions. Like Rooney’s previous novels, Conversations with Friends and Normal People, Beautiful World explores relationships among Dublin’s bookish millennials. Rooney’s characters are haunted by self-doubt. In their correspondence, Christianity emerges as a potential path out of the disenchantment that permeates their lives. Encountering liturgy in the real world complicates Eileen’s understanding of Dublin as a post-Catholic city, shaping email exchanges with her friend Alice. Within the church of Mary Immaculate, Refuge of Sinners, she discovers living, breathing faith that transcends mere social ritual. In Sally Rooney’s latest novel, Beautiful World, Where Are You? twenty-nine-year-old Eileen attends mass and discovers a secret in plain view.
Is it really possible I witnessed such a scene, right in the middle of Dublin, only a few hours ago? Is it possible such things literally go on, in the real world you and I both live in?
Nora Kirkham considers how Sally Rooney’s novel Beautiful World, Where Are You? encourages readers to seek out beauty and closer, richer relationships during times of ‘disenchantment and anxiety’, in the latest contribution to our series on “bingeing” the arts during the pandemic.
0 kommentar(er)
