What I read ages ago: Intermezzo by Sally Rooney

Good evening!

This is a one-off edition of ‘What I’ve been reading this week’, aptly named ‘What I read ages ago’, because the review embargo on Sally Rooney’s fourth novel Intermezzo is lifted and I can finally share my thoughts on it.

I am, above most things, a Sally Rooney fan for numerous reasons. The influence that nineteenth-century fiction has on her work is apparent; the scaffolding of the Victorian novel is evident in the themes, framing and narratives of her novels. I’m of the opinion that more writers should take at least some inspiration from the nineteenth century, an era when the novel was secured as a legitimate art form and (despite criticism to the contrary) experimentation was rife. There are clear markers of the Victorian novel -- realism, picking out the small details within a bigger setting, the straightforward prose-and-chapter form -- but within this, there is an incredible amount of variety, especially when it comes to social commentary. Even the ‘clear markers’ I picked out there aren’t true to every text -- Anne Brontë’ The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, as an example, has an unusual structure, and writers like H.G. Wells and Arthur Conan Doyle play with time and continuity. 

I digress. What I’m saying is that Rooney is clearly someone who appreciates the nineteenth-century novel and takes from it to tell modern stories, something that isn't easy but has a large pay off. On many occasions she starts sections or chapters concentrating on a minute detail, something that Dickens often does, and then looks around, asking of her reader, ‘under what context does this detail exist? What relationships are formed out of it? Who is impacted by it?’, and so on. 

Increasingly throughout her work, the contexts that she addresses exist on or are impacted by the internet. The internet appears in many forms; Skype calls, emails, social media, online news outlets. The internet is also something that is often addressed without being explicitly represented, as Rooney weaves in common discussions that happen on social media into her narratives without ever really saying that this is what she is doing. This has been particularly evident in her two latest novels, Beautiful World, Where Are You? and now, Intermezzo. Beautiful World took social media usage to task, asking us if we can truly represent ourselves in spaces that are designed to promote the facade. Intermezzo, on the other hand, takes contentious issues that are continually dragged into ‘the discourse’, and says, ‘what if we all acted like grown ups?’

These issues are online sex work, polyamory and age-gap relationships. I can almost hear the groans from those who have yet to read the novel, but rest assured, she handles them with acute and fine nuance. Despite how often these subjects come up in online debate, they are very rarely handled with the same care, with people on either side of the debate taking hard-line defence of their belief that they either should or should not exist to the point that the chance for any middle ground is eradicated. Intermezzo is not a novel that is interested in this kind of discussion, instead letting situations play out in real life and allowing characters to go through crises of faith in themselves, their relationships and the situations that they have found themselves in. 

Around a third of the way into the novel, one character says to the other, ‘I can only give you my side of the story, remember. If you were hearing this from him, it would all sound very different.’ This is, to me, the crux of Intermezzo and its characters, who find themselves in situations that they find uncomfortable and strange. They have their reasons for their beliefs, and they equally have their reasons for changing their beliefs, if this happens to them. They have their side of the story and they repeat it to others, to themselves, to the reader. Rooney asks of us, is this true? Or is this shaped by circumstance? Or by what they perceive to be moral goodness? Or social acceptance? And thus we are prompted to question what moral goodness or social norms are, and how and why they exist, and if that in itself is a useful thing. We are not prompted in either direction, it is just laid out for us to make our own conclusions. Near the end of the novel, the same characters are having a discussion, and one says to the other, ‘I can get very focused on being in the right. And my brain sort of glosses over anything I’ve done wrong. Because I view him differently. I don’t really think my actions affect him, I see myself very affected by his actions, but not the other way around.’ I see these two conversations in tandem with one another, a commentary on the act of telling and the act of doing, both of which are warped and impacted by the sometimes ineffable lives that we have within us. And, as is a common theme with Rooney, the message remains that despite it all, we’re all connected, and both actions and speech have consequences. 

Within all of this, there is much discussion about Jesus. Rooney has employed religious iconography and religious-based scenes like funerals before, but I think this is the first time that she explicitly invokes Jesus and his message to such a degree. Almost every character has a relationship with Christ, and they think very long and hard about how their actions and their experiences are either in line or not in line with their perception of this relationship. Some people might be surprised by this invocation -- I wasn’t. Rooney and I are a similar age, and despite the circumstance of geography, we have had a somewhat similar upbringing, by her account. There comes a time in such a life that a reckoning with Christ’s Word comes to a head, and a relationship must either form or completely flounder; in any case, you have to make a decision on whether or not it will all have an impact on the way you see the world. Rooney’s characters simply can’t help it, and their thoughts about the New Testament are almost like a compulsion.

I realise that I have hardly said what the novel is about, and it’s probably best to keep this spoiler-free, in order for you to read it and feel as though you are experiencing all of its intricacies in your own terms. I will as a final point, however, address its title and cover, which are both about chess. Ivan, one of the novel’s protagonists, is a decorated chess player, and his teenage and young adult years are largely defined through the act of playing chess and the culture around it in Ireland and on the world stage. Some of this is inherently tied up with a lot of internet use, which also impacts him in ways that he comes to reckon with as he experiences the world as a responsible adult. And thus lies Rooney’s ability to tie everything together, to argue that we are all connected in one way or another both online and in real life -- as in a game of chess, we are constantly moving around impacting the people around us or even tenuously connected to in ways that might not manifest until several beats later. 

If it wasn’t clear, I loved this book, and I think it is a work of fine skill. Rooney is truly one of the greats of our time.