Climate Change and the Ironies of Omniscience in Rumaan Alam’s Leave the World Behind

Abstract

Abstract 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. 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. 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 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. 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 this way, Leave the World Behind demonstrates the realist novel’s ability to open itself up to the weird realities of the climate crisis.1