I fell over Sally Rooney. The aisle of the bookshop was so packed with her new novel, and I so busy gawking around me, that I almost landed in the middle of Intermezzo, her latest release.
Until a few weeks ago I only knew her name but was always mixing her up with Marian Keys, another famous Irish female author.
I had heard of Normal People, Rooney’s novel that has been dramatised and made Paul Mescal into an international star. But I have never seen it.
Recently I was given and persuaded to read one of her earlier novels, Beautiful World, Where Are You. The person who gave me the book said that she thought it captured the zeitgeist of the modern Irish world.
I know that German word and I have used it often enough but to reassure myself, I looked it up in the dictionary. It says it is the defining spirit or mood of a particular period of history, as shown by the ideas and beliefs of the time.
I think that description successfully captures the substance of the book.
That might lead you to think I like the book. Not really. I struggled to finish it.
But I think she is a very important writer, because she describes and captures much of the atmosphere and the attitudes of an important section of Irish society.
It is populated, mostly, by youthful, college educated, well travelled, politically aware, socially confident, sexually uninhibited, even promiscuous people.
And yet, at another level, despite their apparent sophistication and swagger, unsure and even frightened of their place and purpose within the world.
There is an incredibly insightful depiction of the change in moral mores amongst young Irish Catholics. A morality that is eon miles from that of their parents.
She describes an episode of casual sex followed by Mass attendance where the man is immune, even unaware, to any incongruence and the woman, who hasn’t gone to Mass for years, is uncomfortable and yet attracted to the rituals and the religious faith of her lover.
That counterpoint is widely replicated in present-day Ireland where many young people, who seldom enter a church from one year’s end to the next, attend funerals and weddings, where they fully participate in the Mass, even going to communion. Their grannies would not have approved.
The novel is peppered with insinuations of human and relational incompleteness and longings. But that is accompanied by an awareness of the centrality of big issues such as social justice, poverty, climate change.
It is more agnostic than atheistic and there is a consistent Christian thread running throughout, highlighted in a description of the attractiveness of the person of Jesus.
Her recent novel is reported to have even more religious references and that her fans are worried that she has found God and religion.
I was also reading about the Synod that has wound up in Rome this week. That also has been grappling with the zeitgeist.
The conversations between the Pope and invited delegates are an effort to mould Church structures into keeping with the modern world.
Some are saying that these discussions are the most relevant and important since the Reformation. Others, that the hesitation, even unwillingness, to afford women their rightful stature and authority within the Church is a clear indication that the institution is incapable of meaningful change.
Sally Rooney’s and the Pope’s zeitgeists appear to be on different planets but there is no denying they are travelling in the same orbit.
Both are in pursuit of meaning and purpose. Both are hungry for hope and love and faith.
It would be good for both these planets if they crashed into each other more than they have done in the past.
It was poignant that at the closing address of the synod, the Pope called for a Church that ‘heard the cry of the world’.