LITERARY FICTION

NORMAL PEOPLE by Sally Rooney

(Faber €16.99, 288 pp) SALLY ROONEY’S Conversations With Friends was by some margin the best debut of last year — a zeitgeisty novel about a young Dublin student’s alternating feelings for a former girlfriend and a married man.

It is her second, more conventional novel that has won her a nod in the form of the Booker longlist, however.

Marianne and Connell become lovers when Connell’s mother begins cleaning for Marianne’s much wealthier family. Formidably bright, they continue their on-off liaison while students at Trinity, unable to fully commit to each other but viciously unhappy when not together.

Switching back and forth between them, Rooney presents Marianne and Connell’s messy, self-doubting, self-sabotaging inner lives with intoxicating clarity, so much so you end up feeling a bit wondrously punch drunk, even though the extent of the novel’s actual incident can be summed up in about three sentences.

I enjoyed it intensely, while thinking — and hoping — that it will be with her next novel that Rooney shows us what she is truly capable of.

TRANSCRIPTION by Kate Atkinson

(Doubleday €15.99, 352 pp) ERIC ROBERTS, a humble bank clerk from Surrey, is having a bit of a moment: his parallel life as an MI5 agent is the subject of Anthony Quinn’s novel Our Friends In Berlin, and now the latest by Costa winner Kate Atkinson. Roberts ensnared British Nazi sympathisers during the war by pretending to be a Gestapo member.

Transcription is narrated by Juliet Armstrong, recruited by the government to record the conversations between Godfrey Toby, as Roberts is known here, and Hitler’s ‘fifth column’. She is soon asked to infiltrate a fascist ring herself.

Atkinson dutifully summons up the drab particularity of wartime England in a shadowy, decades-spanning story that asks whether it is ever possible to fully know another person — or, indeed, a character in a novel. Just as Juliet sometimes has to fill in the gaps of what she cannot hear, so the reader has to fill in the gaps left on the page by Atkinson.

But while Juliet’s opaque character is part of the novel’s slippery overarching design, it is also, in the end, a fundamental problem. Come the rug-from-under-feet denouement and you might find yourself crossly baffled rather than intrigued.

THE SILENCE OF THE GIRLS by Pat Barker

(Hamish Hamilton €17.03, 336 pp) WITH her Regeneration trilogy, Pat Barker has proven herself to be one of the great novelists of war, so it is no surprise her latest novel should reimagine Western civilisation’s prototype conflict — the fall of Troy, as told in Homer’s The Iliad.

Here, though, the violent aftermath of the Greek victory is recounted mostly by Briseis, a Trojan queen picked by the great hero Achilles as his personal war trophy. She is forced to sleep with the man who murdered her husband and brothers.

Barker gives a voice to the invariably sexually violated women who go unheard in Homer’s poem of male derring-do. The effect is similar to that of Shakespeare’s history cycle, where it is the widows and mothers who count the real cost of bloodlusting male heroics on the battlefield.

Yet, while Barker demolishes the myths of masculinity, the writing itself often feels sloppy — and not a patch on the books with which she made her name.