Intermezzo, the new Sally Rooney novel has arrived and we all know what to expect —  complicated love lives, fractured relationships, sex, Dublin, smartphones, Trinity College, extreme bookishness, and all the messy compromises of living under late-stage capitalism.

The viability of holding to religious faith … is one of Sally Rooney’s great, recurring, but wildly neglected themes

These expectations are correct, as far as they go. But they are part of a conditioned response: conditioned, that is, by everything that has been written and said about Rooney over the past seven years or so. When one picks up and reads one of the books, a chasm opens up between Rooney-as-she-is-written-about and Rooney-as-she-actually-writes.  And that chasm is greatest when it comes to religion. The viability of holding to religious faith in the modern world — specifically Christian faith — is one of Sally Rooney’s great, recurring, but wildly neglected themes.  

While Rooney’s most famous novel, Normal People (2018), is light on religion, the figure of Christ plays an important part in the back-and-forth between Frances and Bobbi in Conversations with Friends (2017). At one point, when she is ill and in pain, Frances stumbles into a Dublin church and has something at least adjacent to a religious experience. However, 2021’s Beautiful World Where Are You is of a different order again. It is a novel of religious conversion.  

The conversions in question are quiet, hesitant, incomplete, open-ended, but nevertheless real. The novel has four main characters. At the outset Simon is a sincere, Mass-going Catholic, even if his sex life is in flagrant conflict with Church teaching. While others are interested in the person of Christ and the Gospels, he is alone in this. But one of the hinge points of the novel is when Simon’s on-off-on girlfriend Eileen accompanies him to Mass at the Church of Mary Immaculate, Refuge of Sinners (a real Dublin church). This event is carefully described and analysed over the course of several pages.  

Eileen finds herself reeling at being in the company of people saying that they were lifting their hearts up to the Lord and meaning it. Afterwards, she and Simon return to a world outside the church that seems to have been gently elevated and transfigured: “On the street outside they were smiling again and their smiles were mysterious. It was a cool bright Sunday morning, the white facades of buildings reflected the sunlight, traffic was passing, people were out walking dogs, calling to each other across the street. Simon kissed ­Eileen’s cheek, and they wished one another goodbye.”

At the end of the book, Eileen, is now attending Mass as well, which is tied up with a new outlook on the world and the people in it. “I know, I know,” she says, speaking of herself in the third person, “she goes to Mass a couple of times and suddenly she wants to love everyone.”  

Eileen’s best friend is Alice, a successful but tortured novelist.  Following a visit to a church in Paris, she reflects on the person of Christ:

I do love him and I can’t even pretend that it’s only the same love I feel for Prince Myshkin, or for Charles Swann, or for Isabel ­Archer. It is actually something different, a different feeling. And while I don’t, as such, really ‘believe’ that Jesus was resurrected after his death, it’s also true to say that some of the most moving scenes in the Gospels, and some of those to which I return most frequently, take place after the resurrection. I find it hard to separate the Jesus who appears after the resurrection from the man who appears before; they seem to me to be all of one being. I suppose that in his resurrected form, he goes on saying the kind of things that ‘only he’ could say, that I can’t imagine emanating from any other consciousness. But that’s as close as I get to thinking about his divinity. I have a strong liking and affection for him and I feel moved when I contemplate his life and death. That’s all.

By the end of the novel, Alice is praying for her friends and asking herself whether she too has turned into a Catholic. She hasn’t, she answers, before adding, enigmatically, “as far as I know”.  Of the main characters, only Alice’s boyfriend, Felix, remains resolutely uninterested.

All of this and more went almost entirely unmentioned and unexplored by critics and reviewers. With a few honourable exceptions, no-one seemed to want to talk about it. Rooney was interviewed in Waterstones in Piccadilly  when Beautiful World came out. She was asked fourteen questions about the novel, but not one of them touched on religion. Beautiful World‘s Wikipedia entry tells us the themes include romance, friendship, precarity, and social class, but not Christian faith. And like so many others, the review of the novel on the website of RTE, Ireland’s national broadcaster, completely ignored the religious theme of the book.  

Indeed, the sidestepping extends to anything that might deviate from Rooney-as-she-is-written-about. When the RTE review addresses Eileen and Alice’s emailed musings on the state of the world, it doesn’t let on that certain things the friends say to one another, while caveated, might have come from a speech at a National Conservatism or Alliance for Responsible Citizenship conference. Nostalgia? It “makes sense that people are looking back wistfully to a time before the natural world started dying, before our shared cultural forms degraded into mass marketing and before our cities and towns became anonymous employment hubs”. Traditional marriage? It “was an effort at something, and not just a sad sterile foreclosure on the possibility of life. . .. What do we have now? Instead? Nothing.”

Eileen also expresses passionate views about abortion: “I could not stomach the idea of having an abortion just because I’m afraid of climate change. For me (and maybe only for me) it would be a sort of sick, insane thing to do, a way of mutilating my real life as a gesture of submission to an imagined future. I don’t want to belong to a political movement that makes me view my own body with suspicion and terror. No matter what we think or fear about the future of civilisation, women all over the world will go on having babies and I belong with them, and any child I might have belongs with their children. I know in a thin rationalist way that what I’m saying doesn’t make any sense. But I feel it, I feel it, and I know it to be true.” You would think that in Ireland, of all places, this might draw some comment. Not a word.

What, then, of Intermezzo, flooding the shelves of all good bookshops now? While it does not take hold of the plot in quite the same way as in Beautiful World Where Are You, the question of faith in God pulses away through the novel, from beginning to end. In the very first chapter,  a character called Sylvia, a professor of literature, who suffers chronic, debilitating pain following a road accident, is living “a kind of death”, “a death you survive out of politeness, respect for others, out of selfless love.” And then: “Christ also survived his own death and was dignified and exalted.”

Having now entered the novel, Christ is never that far away. Ivan, a twenty-two-year-old chess prodigy, and Margaret, his new lover, separated from her husband and in her mid-thirties, hold a discussion about petitionary prayer, the problem of pain in a divinely ordered world, the contrast between Jesus as healer and friend of sinners and the God “who condemns people to death, for incomprehensible reasons”, and so on. The conversation takes up around six pages. Later in the book, Ivan concludes that “the task of life is to show goodness to others, not to complain about their failings”. It sounds familiar.

Peter, Ivan’s brother, an outwardly successful lawyer whose life is spiralling towards a possible suicide attempt, leads the agonised prayer life of a lapsed Catholic and near-atheist, searching for comfort: “Recalling senselessly the old familiar words, worn smooth by childhood repetition. Blank tokens now, long since expired, exchangeable for nothing. Consoling merely to weigh and handle once again, yes, thy kingdom come.” Sylvia, who is Peter’s former girlfriend, has a “sincere and transcendent love of Christ”, whereas he oscillates between “ironic sort of joking” and an “at times terrifying real and serious fear of Christ”.  He ends up wishing to “do what little good he can with his life. To ask for nothing more, to bow his head, pitifully grateful, God’s humble and grateful servant. Can he imagine anything less like himself?  And yet here he is, defeated, relieved, forgiving everything, praying only to be forgiven.”

Intermezzo is braided too with more minor markers of a Catholicism that will not let go of Ireland, even if Ireland has resolved to let go of it. Peter and Sylvia have a brief discussion about cultural differences between the Protestant and Catholic nations of Europe in which Sylvia, startlingly for a contemporary Irish millennial, uses “we” in a way that nails her colours to the papist mast. (The conversation then evolves into one about the most difficult teachings of Jesus.)  There are occasional locutions too that remind us where we are: a “God rest him” here, a “Lord have mercy” there.

During the final conversation of the book, the main characters, Ivan and Peter, the two temperamentally unsuited brothers, grieving for their father while at each other’s throats, find themselves on the brink of a lasting reconciliation. They pause to discuss whether they believe in God. Both confess that they try to, that they do their best. The scene doesn’t take place in a church, but just outside one: For this conversation, Rooney places her characters at the gates of St Mary’s Pro Cathedral in Dublin. Under its “austere fluted stone columns”, the brothers speak their deepest feelings for one another and redeem a poisoned relationship.  

Yet again, however, all of this is in danger of going completely unremarked. A sarcastic review in the TLS contains no indication that the reviewer even spotted the theme. Apart from a throwaway gag reserved for the very last word, the Guardian review is similarly empty. The Independent, likewise: Nothing. The reviews I’ve seen thus far from Ireland repeat the pattern.

So what is going on? I see two possibilities. The first is very simple. Critics see the religiosity, but are at a total loss when it comes what to say about it.  Rooney is talking about things they never think about, or stopped thinking about long ago, or feel indifferent towards. They opt to say nothing about all of the religious content, kind of pretend it isn’t there, and get their teeth into other Rooneyan themes they feel more comfortable with.

Christ? Catholicism? Yuck, Sally

The second possibility is that certain critics see the content — how could anyone not? — but turn away from it. They wish Rooney would leave that stuff alone and concentrate instead on her role as the anatomist-in-chief of twenty-first-century sex and relationships, who also stirs left-wing politics and modern literature liberally into the mix. Christ? Catholicism? Yuck, Sally. So they try to hide it, in the hope that it will, eventually, go away.  

I’m not sure that they will get their wish, though — partly because, those reviews notwithstanding, cracks are, at last, starting to appear in the critical wall of silence. In Vox, Constance Grady observed that one of the big questions in Intermezzo is, precisely, the question of God. Equally, noticing “the flame of Catholic religious curiosity” flickering strongly in the millennial characters prompted Irish Examiner columnist Sarah Harte to make a number of intriguing observations. Critiquing Catholicism, she writes, “is not standing outside the zeitgeist, in some sort of anti-establishment iconoclasm, it is the zeitgeist”, before concluding “unless Rooney changes the zeitgeist, and I wouldn’t put it past her.”

Indeed. Rooney will, I feel, continue to test through her novels and characters how the post-Catholic Irish, living in a resoundingly post-lifelong monogamy, post-heteronormative, post-frugality Ireland, can yet reach back into their religious heritage for resources to cope with the chaos and unhappiness unleashed by unchecked materialism and sexual desire.

It’s an intriguing line of enquiry and who knows where it may ultimately lead? But the theme certainly doesn’t feel like it is going away. Rooney will carry on challenging her critics to see it and name it.