Intermezzo

i went into this expecting to admire it and not be moved by it. that is roughly what happened with Beautiful World Where Are You, which i thought was brilliantly written and a little cold. Intermezzo surprised me. i was moved by it. not constantly and not in the places i expected but genuinely moved and i want to try and explain why because i think the book is doing something different from what people expect of her.
the setup is two brothers in Dublin after their father dies. Peter is thirty two, a human rights lawyer, holding himself together mostly through medication and a careful management of his time between two women he loves in different ways. Sylvia is his first love from years ago, now dealing with a chronic pain condition that changed the nature of their relationship. Naomi is younger, studying, someone who treats life more lightly than Peter is capable of doing right now. Ivan is twenty two, a competitive chess player who has always been in his brother's shadow a little, who does not talk easily to people, who ends up falling for Margaret, a thirty six year old arts director who lives outside Dublin.
the age gap relationship is what most of the coverage focused on and i think that slightly missed the point. Rooney is not really writing about age gaps. she is writing about what grief does to people and how differently it moves through different kinds of people. Peter processes loss by working harder and managing his emotional exposure very carefully. Ivan processes it by falling headlong into something new and real with someone who does not have the same relationship to his family history that everyone around him does. both of them are trying to survive the same loss using completely different tools and the book is most interesting when you are watching those tools either work or fail.
Ivan is my favourite thing in this novel and i say that as someone who found Peter more relatable in an uncomfortable way. Ivan is young and honest in that slightly painful way where he has not yet learned to protect himself through irony or distance. he just says what he thinks and feels what he feels and the relationship with Margaret works because she is old enough to recognise what that is worth. their scenes together are the warmest things Rooney has written. i did not expect warmth from her at this scale and i was glad to be wrong.
the chess is also genuinely interesting and i want to say that because i think readers put off by the subject matter are missing something. Rooney uses the structure of chess, the long calculation, the ability to hold multiple possible futures in your head at once, to illuminate how Ivan thinks about everything including the people he loves. it is not showy or forced. it just sits inside the character in a way that makes sense.
Peter took me longer to get into. his sections are written in a style that is more fractured and more self-interrupting than Ivan's, which reflects his state of mind but makes him harder to spend time with early on. i think Rooney wanted you to feel the effort it takes to be inside Peter's head and she succeeded but there were chapters where i was impatient in a way i was not during Ivan's sections. by the end though Peter earned it. the scene where the two brothers finally talk properly is the best scene in the book and it works because Rooney made you wait for it and made you feel what it cost both of them to get there.
Sylvia is the character i wanted more of. she is vivid in every scene she is in and her situation, the way chronic pain changed what was possible between her and Peter, is handled with a lot of care. but she gets less page time than the story needs her to have and i think that is the one real structural gap in the book. she is doing a lot of emotional work for the ending and you feel the slight imbalance.
the prose is exactly what you would expect from Rooney which is to say it is very good and also quite demanding. the interior monologue is long and specific and circles around feelings rather than stating them directly. i think this is actually better suited to audio than to print in a way that surprised me and i listened to large chunks of it after reading the first half on paper. the audiobook is narrated by Eanna Hardwicke and he does something particular with Peter's voice that made those sections more bearable than they were on the page. if you try this in print and find yourself losing patience, switch formats before you give up entirely.
i would give it four and a half out of five. it is not my favourite Rooney, that is probably still Normal People, but it is the one where i can most clearly see her trying to do something new and largely pulling it off. she is writing about older people now, about grief rather than just desire, about the damage that accumulates over years rather than the intensity of something just beginning. that feels like a real expansion and i think it is worth paying attention to.