A reflection of ourselves
...without a single word wasted
Normal People Sally Rooney F aber & Faber €19.60 ★★★★★
Connell and Marianne are Leaving cert students as the local school in Ca rick lea, a fictional town in the west of Ireland. Connell is the son of Lorraine, a lone parent still her thirties, who cleans house for Marianne’s mother, a haughty solicitor with notions.
While he is popular at school, a star athlete looked up to by the other boys and fancied by the girls, Marianne is an outcast, dismissed as weird, and maybe unhinged.
Nonetheless, they make a connection, albeit it a superficially sexual one at first, and embark on a clandestine relationship. For Connell, this is terrifying. The thought he might publicly be linked to this pariah means he insists Marianne says nothing about it – as author Sally Rooney puts it: ‘He carried the secret around like something large and hot, like an overfull tray of hot drinks that he had to carry everywhere and never spill.’ The irony, of course, is that he is oblivious to the fact Marianne has no one to tell, and such a claim in any case would be dismissed with incredulity.
Aware of his status, he asks a popular girl, Rachel, to the debs, a move that makes Marianne leave the school altogether, and study at home alone for her exams.
Both are intellectually curious and academically engaged, and they end up at Trinity College. In Rooney’s delightfully episodic structure, we then dip in and out of their lives over the course of four years, sometimes when months have elapsed, other times after just five minutes.
In Dublin, the tables turn. Connell, the star footballer, finds himself a small fish in a big pond, while Marianne, liberated from the petty judgment of a small town, flourishes. Inevitably, their paths cross and, despite other relationships on both sides, there is a strong emotional bond and sexual attraction that often rears its head.
It is, in many ways, a very simple tale, and while I was completely engaged with Connell and Marianne as people, I was never really sure I actually liked them. Their relationship is full of missed cues, with each often interpreting the other’s actions incorrectly. They talk non-stop but they never seem to say the things they need to say or, if they do, the other never seems to hear them.
I have no idea if they really are emblematic of younger people nowadays but if they are, they seem just as repressed as previous generations were, albeit for different reasons. They certainly are sexually liberated, but their relationships seem incredibly casual.
Perhaps it’s the consequence of living in the Tinder generation, but boyfriends and girlfriends are discarded like takeaway coffee cups, and Connell and Marianne are so self-absorbed that this never seems to cause the two of them much in the way or remorse or regret.
Older readers like myself probably will be astonished too at the very casual way sex is treated. One boy shows nude photos of his girlfriend to all his friends, while Connell and Marianne have a conversation about whether or not they also should exchange photos of themselves naked. Technology seems to have made this terribly simple, though again no one seems to care very much that the photos might be shared.
The problem with Normal People is that so much of the narrative reveals the inner thoughts of the lead characters, the supporting players are less satisfactorily fleshed out. There’s a posh boy whose banker daddy was one of the architects of the financial crash, and he is a bit of a stereotype, snobbish and sexually sadistic too. Despite this flaw, and another major one – an ending that seems rushed – Normal People has much to commend it and it is little surprise it was long-listed for this year’s Man Booker Prize. Rooney
effortlessly manages to get both Connell’s and Marianne’s voices pitch perfect, and displays a hugely perceptive insight into modern masculinity, a world in which being in a relationship seems as terrifying as not being in one might have been 30 years ago.
I found myself rooting for this odd couple not least because their getting together would spare others the burden of indulging their angst. Rooney, though, spices the proceedings up with savage observations that occasionally stop you dead in your tracks. Marianne’s mother, for instance, believes her daughter lacks ‘warmth’, by which, Rooney tartly but memorably observes, she means the ability to beg for love from people who hate her. Or this: ‘You learn nothing very profound about yourself simply by being bullied; but by bullying someone else, you learn something you can never forget.’ That one actually made me gasp.
Sally Rooney has the greatest of gifts for a writer, the gift of authenticity, and there is a wisdom running through the book that makes you feel she has an old, and indeed moral, head on young shoulders. There’s not a wasted word from start to finish, and however well garnished in the genuinely beautiful writing, there is a cold but realistic seam of uncomfortable truth. All normal people will see something of themselves reflected.
‘Savage observations occasionally stop you dead in your tracks’