CANR
WORK TITLE: Briefly Very Beautiful
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE:
WEBSITE:
CITY:
STATE:
COUNTRY:
NATIONALITY:
LAST VOLUME:
RESEARCHER NOTES:
PERSONAL
Born 1983, in Brighton, England; children: two.
EDUCATION:Attended Trinity College (Dublin, Ireland); School of Oriental and African Studies University of London, master’s degree.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Writer and editor. Wall Street Journal, Robert L. Bartley Fellow; TLS: Times Literary Supplement, fiction editor, features editor, contributor.
WRITINGS
SIDELIGHTS
Roz Dineen is a British writer and editor. She attended Trinity College in Dublin, Ireland before earning a master’s degree at the School of Oriental and African Studies University of London. Dineen served as a Robert L. Bartley Fellow at the Wall Street Journal before joining TLS: Times Literary Supplement, where she contributed articles and served as fiction editor and, later, features editor.
In 2024, Dineen released her first book, Briefly Very Beautiful: A Novel. Set in the U.K., it tells the story of Cass, who is navigating societal collapse while trying to protect her children. Her husband, Nathaniel is living abroad and has left them behind, in addition to his two children from previous marriages. When an activist group targets a playground, Cass brings the children to Nathaniel’s mother’s home in rural Eden. Feeling unsafe there, as well, she brings her brood north to an area that is reported to be free from violence.
Flora Bowen, contributor to the London Sunday Telegraph, described Briefly Very Beautiful as “disturbing and stylish.” Bowen added: “Dineen was previously fiction editor at the Times Literary Supplement, and her years of close reading are evident. The prose is fluent and precise throughout in describing horrors both physical and psychological.” A Kirkus Reviews critic called the volume “often alarming and upsetting, but worth reading for the deep heart at its center.” Commenting on the suggestion of hope in the ending, TLS writer, Sarah Crown, remarked: “Emerging from this novel into the not-so-cold light of 2024, one wonders whether this suggestion of salvation is an extension of one of the author’s metaphors: the creation of another false sanctuary in which her readers can—briefly, beautifully—take refuge. Time will tell for them. As for us, we owe Roz Dineen a debt. This is a remarkable book.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Kirkus Reviews, June 1, 2024, review of Briefly Very Beautiful: A Novel.
London Telegraph Online, May 27, 2024, Flora Bowen, review of Briefly Very Beautiful.
London Sunday Telegraph, June 2, 2024, Flora Bowen, “A Grim Vision of a Society Facing Ecocatastrophe,” review of Briefly Very Beautiful, p. 15.
TLS. Times Literary Supplement, June 14, 2024, Sarah Crown, “This Other Eden: A Remarkable Debut of Societal Collapse and the Search for Refuge,” review of Briefly Very Beautiful, p. 16.
ONLINE
PEW Literary Agency website, https://www.pewliterary.com/ (July 9, 2024), author profile.
Roz Dineen was an editor at the Times Literary Supplement for twelve years, serving as fiction editor and later features editor. She has also written extensively for the Times Literary Supplement, where her essays and reviews have covered a range of topics from addiction to motherhood, from Jonathan Franzen to J. G. Ballard and Sally Rooney. She studied English literature at Trinity College, Dublin, received a master's degree in international studies and diplomacy from SOAS, London, and was a Robert L. Bartley Fellow at the Wall Street Journal. Briefly Very Beautiful is her debut novel.
Roz Dineen
Roz Dineen was at the Times Literary Supplement for twelve years, variously as Fiction Editor, Features Editor and a contributor of essays, reviews and a column.
Roz was born in Brighton in 1983. She studied English Literature at Trinity College, Dublin, and received a Masters in International Studies and Diplomacy from SOAS, London. She was Robert L. Bartley Fellow at The Wall Street Journal, where her writing has also appeared.
She lives with her two children in Peckham, South London; a few metres from what was once her great-grandfather's home. Her debut novel is forthcoming from Bloomsbury.
Agent: Eleanor Birne
Byline: Flora Bowen
Environmental catastrophe, civil unrest, terrorism: the nation is on the verge. "Every aspect of society [has] grown slowly worn and useless over years -- the hospitals, the schools, the transport, the food." The climate is collapsing, and the heat is unbearable. Butterflies die en masse -- "little black bodies smashed and sticky, with still-twitching legs" -- as wildfires roll across the land.
In her disturbing and stylish debut novel, Briefly Very Beautiful, set in a dystopian version of a Britain-like country, Roz Dineen depicts the shift between what have become known as the Old World and the New. The decline has been gradual. People have been leaving 'The City' one by one; the government has slowly ceased to function. Ecological breakdown has engendered financial and political instability, which in turn has led to the rise of Gaia, a group of male eco-terrorists who worship Mother Earth and carry out an attack in a children's playground.
Amid all this, one woman and her children flee their urban home for the countryside. Cass, mother to a one-year-old baby, has only memories of emails, iced coffee and the internet, all now relics of the past. "Before everything became awful," she thinks, "it was briefly very beautiful." The family -- composed of her two step-children and her child; her husband is overseas -- leave after the escalating terror attacks approach their house, and the air becomes too polluted to breathe.
With some assistance from Cass's husband's family, they travel across the country, negotiating internal migration controls, attempting to reach the cleaner, cooler northern regions. All the time, they're seeking water and food, as well as contact with Cass's husband, a doctor, whose own story of life in a foreign land is interwoven throughout. Their journey moves with ease between precise description and the broad ambitions of a saga: "When you have to leave, you will be able to. You will get the children out of there. You will carry them away. You will reassess: you will hear the sanity in what you'd thought was madness, and the madness in what you'd thought was sane."
As she moves the family across this unnamed land, Dineen sketches out dark visions of its social and political reality. Refugees collect at border zones; semi-anarchic clusters of ecological resistance develop; the wealthy speak "like money" and move to private compounds. Although the bigger political picture has become obscure to Cass and co, there are occasional references to the "Black Box Government", a failed institution that has retreated into silence after failing to secure its pledge of a "liveable future for all".
Like the characters, however, we don't know much more than this. We're told relatively little even of Cass's own attitude towards the leaders who're implied to have been in power during society's decay. At one point, as if to justify this, Cass reflects that everyone has become mentally lazy through the heat; even so, it's frustrating to not have the characters discuss their own society, especially the children, whose interactions with Cass are otherwise realistically playful, and in doing so bring levity to a plot that can, at times, be unremittingly grim. The intelligent and curious Vi, at eight years old, would surely have wanted to ask Cass more questions about the world.
On the other hand, Dineen was previously fiction editor at the Times Literary Supplement, and her years of close reading are evident.The prose is fluent and precise in describing horrors both physical and psychological. At times, it lifts into the grandeur of classical myth, transcending a story of personal survival, but Dineen keeps the novel grounded in the immediacy of the characters' physical concerns.
Not every character is fully realised, particularly Cass's husband and her step-mother: they're presented clearly as on one side or another. Set against the hauntingly realistic landscape, dialogue and action, this sometimes frustrated; but on the other hand, it also put me in mind of Greek tragedy, in which characters are rendered true through action and peril, not the trappings of personality. Their concerns are raw and urgent, their lives a matter of daily survival; that urgency makes the book almost impossible to put down. Dineen's debut may be the stuff of sleepless nights; at least, then, you can awake in the old and beautiful world that, for now, remains your own.
Briefly Very Beautiful is published by Bloomsbury at £16.99. To order your copy for £14.99, call 0808 196 6794 or visit Telegraph Books
CAPTION(S):
Credit: EPA
Roz Dineen's novel imagines a Britain-like country on the brink; pictured, London during a major fire in 2007
Credit: Sophie Davidson
Briefly Very Beautiful is Dineen's debut novel
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2024 Telegraph Group Ltd.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk
Source Citation
Source Citation
MLA 9th Edition APA 7th Edition Chicago 17th Edition Harvard
"Is this eco-thriller a portrait of Britain's nightmare future? Briefly Very Beautiful, Roz Dineen's disturbing debut novel, follows a woman trying to save her family amid environmental armageddon; Briefly Very Beautiful, Roz Dineen's disturbing debut novel, follows a woman trying to save her family amid environmental armageddon." Telegraph Online, 27 May 2024, p. NA. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A795449282/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=c66edd49. Accessed 25 June 2024.
QUOTED: "disturbing and stylish."
"Dineen was previously fiction editor at the Times Literary Supplement, and her years of close reading are evident. The prose is fluent and precise throughout in describing horrors both physical and psychological."
Byline: Flora Bowen BRIEFLY VERY BEAUTIFUL by Roz Dineen
336pp, Bloomsbury, T PS14.99 (0808 196 6794), RRPPS16.99, ebook PS11.89
Environmental catastrophe, civil unrest, terrorism: the nation is on the verge. "Every aspect of society [has] grown slowly worn and useless over years - the hospitals, the schools, the transport, the food." The heat is unbearable. Wildfires roll across the land. As the government ceases to function, Gaia, a group of male eco-terrorists, come to prominence, carrying out an attack in a children's playground.
Roz Dineen's disturbing and stylish debut novel is set in a dystopian version of a Britain-like country, and centres on a woman and her children fleeing their urban home for the countryside. Cass, the mother, has only memories of emails, iced coffee and the internet, all now relics of the past. "Before everything became awful," she thinks, "it was briefly very beautiful." Seeking to escape the rise in terrorism, they set out across the country, attempting to reach cleaner, cooler northern lands.
Dineen sketches dark visions of the new social and political reality. Refugees collect at border zones; semi-anarchic clusters of ecological resistance develop; the wealthy speak "like money" and move to private compounds. Although the bigger political picture has become obscure to
Cass and co, there are occasional references to the "Black Box Government", a failed institution that has retreated into silence.
Like the characters, we don't know much more than this. We are told relatively little even of Cass's own attitude towards the leaders who are implied to have been in power during society's decay. It's frustrating not to have the characters discuss their own society, especially the children, whose interactions with Cass are otherwise realistically playful.
On the other hand, Dineen was previously fiction editor at the Times Literary Supplement, and her years of close reading are evident. The prose is fluent and precise throughout in describing horrors both physical and psychological. At times, it lifts into the grandeur of classical myth, transcending a story of personal survival, but Dineen keeps the novel grounded in the immediacy of the characters' physical concerns.
This debut may be the stuf f of sleepless nights; at least you can arise in the old and beautiful world that, for now, remains your own.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2024 Sunday Telegraph
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/
Source Citation
Source Citation
MLA 9th Edition APA 7th Edition Chicago 17th Edition Harvard
"A grim vision of a society facing ecocatastrophe." Sunday Telegraph [London, England], 2 June 2024, p. 15. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A796013802/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=5d13fda9. Accessed 25 June 2024.
QUOTED: "Often alarming and upsetting, but worth reading for the deep heart at its center."
Dineen, Roz BRIEFLY VERY BEAUTIFUL Overlook (Fiction None) $28.00 7, 2 ISBN: 9781419767951
British writer Dineen's dystopian story about a woman struggling to keep her children safe in a world on the brink of collapse feels uncomfortably as if it's describing not a fictional future but next week.
Cass lives in "The City," never named and located in the south of a country also unnamed but with a British feel. It's facing extreme versions of conditions familiar today: an increasingly hot climate, frequent fires, collapsing infrastructure, corrupt authoritarian government, extremist gangs, and fraying social norms. Choosing to work abroad, Cass' husband, Nathaniel, a doctor, has left her behind in The City, where she attempts to protect their children from deteriorating conditions. Many of the strong mothers in recent fiction pale in comparison to Cass, with her fierce maternal commitment--not only to her own baby but also to the 4- and 8-year-olds whose mothers died during Nathaniel's previous two marriages. She experiences typical moments of contemporary motherhood, from easing a resistant child to sleep to resenting a husband's lack of involvement to sexual fantasizing, but Cass also deals with the breakdown of electricity and communication technology, has a room devoted to bottled water storage, worries that the kids have become used to breathing burned air, and regularly rehearses "terror runs" in her head to prepare for the potential moment when she must escape with the kids. Then a group of male climate activists--Nathaniel thinks they're incels--attacks a playground. Cass first heads to her mother-in-law's secluded rural home, where there's food and breathable air, but staying with the untrustworthy Eden proves untenable. Cass' next stop is a commune of sorts in the supposedly safe, walled-off north. But safety is never certain; Cass' choices, never easy to make. The new world order described by Dineen's graceful prose is sometimes unbearably depressing, yet this is not an apocalypse. Happiness remains a possibility for Cass and her kids.
Often alarming and upsetting, but worth reading for the deep heart at its center.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2024 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Source Citation
Source Citation
MLA 9th Edition APA 7th Edition Chicago 17th Edition Harvard
"Dineen, Roz: BRIEFLY VERY BEAUTIFUL." Kirkus Reviews, 1 June 2024, p. NA. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A795673879/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=b88ea8d6. Accessed 25 June 2024.
QUOTED: "Emerging from this novel into the not-so-cold light of 2024, one wonders whether this suggestion of salvation is an extension of one of the author's metaphors: the creation of another false sanctuary in which her readers can—briefly, beautifully—take refuge. Time will tell for them. As for us, we owe Roz Dineen a debt. This is a remarkable book."
BRIEFLY, VERY BEAUTIFUL
ROZ DINEEN
326pp. Bloomsbury. 16.99 [pounds sterling].
What do you call science fiction that's barely fiction; literature set in a tomorrow whose hot breath we already feel on our necks? Whatever you choose to call it, Roz Dineen's debut novel is an exemplar of the form: a woozy tale of dogged survival set amid the dying embers of an instantly recognizable world. In its exploration of an almost-now in which new realities press up against, then swarm over, old civilities, it stands alongside the likes of Kim Stanley Robinson's The Ministry of the Future (2020) and Rumaan Alam's Leave the World Behind (2020). And in its looping, lyrical prose, it surpasses both.
Briefly Very Beautiful opens on a vision of an English city--"The City", maybe London, maybe Birmingham. Like the rest of the world, it is in the grip of a creeping deterioration. "Every aspect" of it, we learn, "had grown slowly worn and useless over years--the hospitals, the schools, the transport, the food, the bills so heavy, the bureaucracy slow-motioned into a farce." The causes of this breakdown are manifold, but one--the climate crisis --appears to have driven all the rest, as well as giving rise to the more narcotic grace notes that contribute to this particular apocalypse's initially sedative atmosphere. "The summers", we hear, "became longer and longer and hotter still and extended into other seasons"; children "fried sloppy eggs on the asphalt and called it a science lesson"; "blooms as big as heads" nod from front gardens; for several weeks, the streets fill with "thousands and thousands of butterflies".
But abundance quickly segues into scarcity--of power, water, internet connections--and the soporific warmth, which at first leads to "ease between people", becomes fierce heat: oppressive, inescapable, ultimately inflammatory. Fires kindle, some of them chemical, some so big they merit proper names: "The First Great Fire", "The Second Great Fire", "The Midlands Fire, beyond the outskirts of The City". The air "smells of burning". An eco-terrorist group, Gaia, launches indiscriminate attacks. The government "became a black box"; the police no longer come when called; there are new viruses, and new wars. People hunker down, eke out essentials, torpidly adhere to remembered patterns: school, when it's open; the park, when curfew is lifted; the shops, when there's food on the shelves. They ponder the possibility of escape.
In the midst of all this is Cass. Her husband, Nathaniel, a burns specialist, has left for a foreign war; she is alone in The City with three small children, trying to make their lives work. On the one hand, things appear disconcertingly normal--she makes toast for Vi, the eight-year-old, persuades the four-year-old Maggs to brush her teeth, takes Daisy, the baby, to a toddlers' art class, where the other mothers reminisce about the first day the internet went down. On the other hand, life has become grotesque. The kitchen floor is too hot for bare feet at Six in the morning. Everyone must stay inside on "Exceptional Danger Days". Gaia--who take a dim view of humanity, including human procreation--target playgrounds. As the fires close in, the power judders on and off, and the calls from Nathaniel (whose own story appears throughout in minor interludes) peter out. Cass realizes it's time to leave.
What follows is something akin to a quest narrative, through somewhere akin to Britain, in which Cass and her children flee north, then further north, seeking cleaner air, cooler nights, refuge. Dineen is fascinated by the idea of false sanctuaries, real-life gingerbread houses. Their first stop is at the house of Nathaniel's mother, the ambiguous, imperious Eden, less prelapsarian than witchy. Her house is buried deep in the countryside, hidden by woodland, haunted by wild animals--deer, rabbits, badgers. The food is "bountiful", the air a little lighter, the children can play outside. But it seems, in the end, that it is Eden who is playing games. The little family is forced to flee again, hitching a lift with a kindly stranger to the border--formerly marked by a sign, now a site of barricades and refugee camps--in the hope that Nathaniel's half-estranged brother Arthur will take them over into the north country where he has established a community at the family's childhood holiday home of Eigleath. The question of whether this, too, is a false sanctuary --and if so, whether safety can be found anywhere --forms the novel's compelling third act.
It is possible, at the end of Briefly Very Beautiful, to have hope for a future: some hope, that is, for some people, who, through luck, judgement, connections, goodness or wealth, may be able to make it through. But emerging from this novel into the not-so-cold light of 2024, one wonders whether this suggestion of salvation is an extension of one of the author's metaphors: the creation of another false sanctuary in which her readers can--briefly, beautifully --take refuge. Time will tell for them. As for us, we owe Roz Dineen a debt. This is a remarkable book.
Sarah Crown is Director of Literature at Arts Council England
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2024 NI Syndication Limited
https://www.the-tls.co.uk/
Source Citation
Source Citation
MLA 9th Edition APA 7th Edition Chicago 17th Edition Harvard
Crown, Sarah. "This other Eden: A remarkable debut of societal collapse and the search for refuge." TLS. Times Literary Supplement, no. 6324, 14 June 2024, p. 16. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A797827369/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=266628fa. Accessed 25 June 2024.