Sally Rooney as Arthur Koestler

Sally Rooney stole my career without ever having met me. As our foremost millennial novelist, reading her works is reading a version of the anxieties and experiences my compatriots and I have lived; observing her career is watching a success I dream of still. My incurable envy of her work has led me to canonise her: not as a saint, but alongside other writers of the literary canon, alongside other people who have influenced me, and to read her in the context of other authors. Arthur Koestler, whose books show the mundane and interior lives of radicals, sits alongside her gloriously and elucidates our understanding of Rooney’s place in modern literature.

Orwell describes Koestler’s work as “not satisfactory,”* but this does not have to mean a dislike or a lack of charm of his writing, simply that Koestler’s storytelling creates an urge in him: an urge for an impossible, intangible ‘more’. Greater narrative clarity or a stronger denouement would be a lie when we consider what Orwell says he loves in Koestler’s work: it is that he has “digested his [political] material and can treat it on an aesthetic level” and yet that he is also aware that “to take a rational political decision one must have a picture of the future,” something that was not then and is not now possible. This ‘urge’ for more is something which I find reflected in Rooney’s work. Invariably at the close of Rooney’s books her characters continue to have the problems they did before – mental health struggles, family dramas, difficult relationships – and yet they have found a path forwards, perhaps. We have lived with them through one cycle, and they progress through their lives, changed by the narrative but not in the satisfying sense of a bildungsroman so much as in the meandering way of Proust. She doesn’t, like Plath, present a perceptible yet distant future where her heroines are stable, nor like Orwell end the books with a profound, harsh inevitability. Instead, Rooney’s books end like a television series that’s been renewed: perfect, unflinching, developed… but ultimately we could step back into the lives of these characters in a year, or ten, and witness more of the same. Orwell told us that “as a political statement, this is insufficient,” but people do not live their lives as political statements, and both Koestler and Rooney are writing of systems, yes, but people within systems, characters who are stymied (as we all are) by their relationship to the system, and our feelings (as her countrymen put it forty years prior), that “it’s a rat trap, Billy, but you’re already caught.”** “Koestler is too acute not to see” the depression that comes with having fought for a ‘better’ that must inevitably be corrupted, “and too sensitive not to remember the original objective.” With Rooney, too, it isn’t so much left-wing politics as left-wing malaise that we see reflected back at us from the page. His works “seem shallow” in the same way that Rooney has been criticised for being myopic: this only matters if you’re not into that kind of literature.

Naturally, Rooney is, like Koestler, “foreign” – her Irish identity so intertwined with her books that neither the Irish landscape nor style of dialogue was removed for adaptation – but to be Irish is to inhabit a liminal space. Ireland is English as a first language, part of a grand tradition of literary heritage which overlaps with and is often confused for the London or English scene, yet it is also the shadow of British colonialism and recent, currently tentative, peace cast over the European identity which ought to be uncontested. Like German-Hungarian Koestler, born in imperial Austria-Hungary whose state collapsed when he was ten, Rooney’s language and identity are tied with a complex, post-colonial upbringing: Good Friday agreements and Brexit alongside neoliberal prosperity, a heritage of beauty and art which is found alongside propriety, radicalism, and self-determination forged from martyrdom and national poets. This bubbles up in her work, often explicitly, as her characters have long discussions about their socio-economic backgrounds and their effects and are even characterised by the political aspects of their own work. Rooney backs this up with her own political stances: whether complying with BDS sanctions or writing essays to defend renters in Ireland, we can never forget that Rooney (like Koestler) is Marxist.

“Flow” is a word Rooney returns to with regards to her practise, whether the ‘flow’ of conversations between friends or the ‘flow’ as a state she entered whilst debating, Rooney enters ‘flow’ and words come out. Words that, whilst they may reflect her own preoccupations or even her opinions, are fully fictional. As Vanity Fair state, “while Rooney has publicly identified as a Marxist, she’s largely saved her most sweeping sociopolitical pronouncements for the plane of fictional characters and hypothetical debates.” We see similar effects with Koestler’s practice (though we do not know how he defines it): though he was twice imprisoned (in Spain and again in the UK) and was sympathetic to the 1919 Hungarian communist revolution he never helped to create a state government, which are the uniting themes of his books ‘Darkness At Noon’ and ‘The Gladiators’, nor did he accept his fate uncritically, at any point, as part of a greater machination, as his characters do. Whilst isolated actions or overarching outlooks might be political in the work of both writers, it is human behaviour above all that their books are concerned with: like Rooney it was Koestler’s preoccupations, not his direct experiences, which guided his fiction and his journalism, and when his characters share experiences with him we cannot assume that they share his perspectives from the self-evident truth he acted differently. Like Rooney, Koestler uses fiction to explore perspectives and we should not assume that his characters are mouthpieces, rather actors in a Socratic dialogue with the author or the critic as much as with other characters. This speaks to the experiences of both: Rooney as a champion debater, Koestler as a communist and journalist. Beyond the characters who share experiences with the authors are rich interiors, debate, and a desire for great truths, perhaps considered myopic or even dull by readers who do not share their fascinations.

The truth is obvious: Rooney doesn’t have my career. She doesn’t even share my interests or experiences. Were my books to be published I doubt a comparison would even be drawn they are so different to hers, yet she still engenders in me not simply respect but also a pure and unreasonable jealousy I haven’t felt since Lorde’s debut album; it is a jealousy which acknowledges that, although she stands on the shoulders of the same giants I do, this woman’s work will impact me as much as the greats that have inspired us both. A talent can be trained and honed, but insight? That is the true kernel of greatness, and I see it in Sally Rooney as Orwell saw it in Koestler.

* all unattributed quotes are from Orwell’s 1944 essay on Koestler, his friend. here

** The Boomtown Rats. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SnyQqDbt7xo

On This Topic:

• I’m trying to read more millennial authors after attending a panel on them at BAAS this year: currently I’m reading Taipei by Tao Lin but have also downloaded a couple of Ottessa Moshfegh books and read Eliza Clark’s debut novel.
• Where to begin with Koestler? Arrival and Departure was his first book written in English and, personally, I do think you can tell. The Gladiators is the easiest entry point of what I’ve read, though – I must confess – I only know the trilogy discussed here, and may yet read his later works in the future.
• Orwell, on the other hand, I’m going to assume you have already begun with and recommend the deep cuts you should be going to: my personal favourite is Homage To Catalonia, it changed my life and broke my heart, but for a more millennial sensibility try Keep The Aspidistra Flying – personally, I think it’s the first of his fiction worth bothering with as a casual fan – and, if you want something bitter and funny, read his journals from the Wigan Pier era, especially him en route to Wigan (Staffordshire does not come off well). His nonfiction is generally worth reading and you can’t go wrong with it.

To-Do:

• Alphabet Superset
• Call SLC
• Do enough to get the TSB switch bonus

Today’s Culture:

• Do you have a favourite boygenius member? Mine is Lucy Dacus, and you can tell.
• E45 has patched up my psoriasis where other, pricier skincare couldn’t.
• Let us celebrate the greatest of all foods: humble butter. It improves cooking, transforms simple bread or veggies into gourmet dishes, is versatile and delicious, can take a back seat or be a main flavour. I love butter. If you see me and I’ve gained weight, mind your business.