"Normal People" by Sally Rooney

This has become a popular twelve part drama on BBC3. It was longlisted for the Booker Prize in 2018.

It is a Romeo and Juliet but the reason these two lovers are star-crossed lies mostly in themselves. Throughout the book, almost from the start, we are desperate to discover whether these two utterly mismatched people will end up together. We know, and all their friends know, that they are in love, but when oh when will they realise it and progress to the happy ending we all want? Repeatedly, the course of true love is derailed by their repeated misunderstandings of one another.

Characters

I was utterly beguiled by the characters of Marianne and so many of the minor characters: Rob and Eric, Connell’s friends from school, and Gareth and Jamie, Marianne’s other boyfriends.

But I didn’t get Connell at all. He is supposed to be extremely shy but this doesn’t seem to stop him talking Marianne into bed. He is supposed to be a voracious reader and a to-be-brilliant writer but his understanding of and empathy with other people seems minimal. Certainly his reading hasn’t improved his vocabulary: for a top English student at the top Irish university in a country famous for its eloquence and blarney he is almost entirely inarticulate. A point is made early on that he has read Doris Lessing’s Golden Notebook (top marks for perseverance) but he appears to have learnt nothing from it. When he reads Jane Austen's Emma at college he realises "that the same imagination he uses as a reader is necessary to understand real people also, and to be intimate with them." (p 72) but he never seems to apply that lesson. I found his awkwardness difficult to believe.

To be fair (a key Irishism in the book) one of the points that the author makesd throughout the book is that literature cannot educate. Much later Marianne relfects about another of her lovers:  "He’s sensitive to the most minuscule of aesthetic failures, in painting, in cinema, even in novels or television shows. Sometimes when Marianne mentions a film she has recently watched, he waves his hand and says: It fails for me. This quality of discernment, she has realised, does not make Lukas a good person. He has managed to nurture a fine artistic sensitivity without ever developing any real sense of right and wrong." (p 196) Connell at a literary reading also realises:  "It was culture as class performance, literature fetishised for its ability to take educated people on false emotional journeys, so that they might afterwards feel superior to the uneducated people whose emotional journeys they liked to read about." (p 228) Art alone, it seems, cannot teach. You need to experience life as well. Perhaps this whole book is about Connell growing up. But even at the very end he doesn't seem to have learnt the key lesson that not saying things leads to relationship problems. 

The problem is that for the plot to work Connell, the straightforward boy, has to repeatedly sabotage his road to happiness with Marianne by misunderstanding her and by his inability to express what he wants. So he has to be inarticulate because otherwise the relationship could only be damaged if he had a heroic flaw and he is too nice for that. He is supposed to be anxious at the start of the book: he worries about whether his desire for sex makes him weird, rather than normal:"His friends don’t think of him as a deviant person, a person who could say to Marianne Sheridan, in broad daylight, completely sober: Is it okay if I come in your mouth?" (p 28) But that's the point: everyone else thinks he is nice and normal and for me his depression later in the book was a surprise (perhaps that is the way it is in life when you discover someone is depressed or they commit suicide). Perhaps he is just spoiled, not financially of course (he has had to work for two years in a garage so he can afford his own real possession, the car), but emotionally, the only son of a single mother; the quote above can equally suggest that Connell always gets what he wants and then feels sorry for himself when it doesn't make him happy.

His behaviour at the start, prepared to sacrifice his relationship with Marianne for the sake of peer popularity, is most fully articulated after a school friend commits suicide: "Nothing had meant more to Rob than the approval of others; to be thought well of, to be a person of status. He would have betrayed any confidence, any kindness, for the promise of social acceptance. He’d been the same way himself, or worse. He had just wanted to be normal, to conceal the parts of himself that he found shameful and confusing." (p 219). Rob is the lad who had previously shown pictures of his naked girlfriend to his mates, to Connell's disgust. Rob's suicide triggers Connell's depression, as if Rob is somehow an alter ego. It is clever how often the author comments on her characters using the device of them thinking about another character.

The character of Marianne is much more coherent. We learn early that her now-deceased father used to beat her mother, and her. Her brother is also physically abusive towards her while her mother ignores her. She develops into someone who accepts, even courts, humiliation and physical violence: sexually she enjoys (?) being dominated and hurt but Connell only wants to protect her and look after her. Right from the start she thinks: "She has never believed herself fit to be loved by any person." (p 46) By the end she is analysing this more deeply but it is still essentially the same idea: "There’s always been something inside her that men have wanted to dominate, and their desire for domination can look so much like attraction, even love. In school the boys had tried to break her with cruelty and disregard, and in college men had tried to do it with sex and popularity, all with the same aim of subjugating some force in her personality." (p 198)

Structure of the book: the plot: Spoilers here!

In the first part of the book, Connell and Marianne are the brightest pupils at their school but while Connell is popular, a football player, Marianne is a loner and bullied. Connell’s mum works for Marianne’s high powered solicitor mum as a cleaner and one day when Connell picks his mum up from Marianne’s house he starts to talk to Marianne. Soon they are having regular secret sex but Connell, not wanting to damage his popularity at school, insists their affair remain secret. When, to prevent gossip, he invites another girl to the school prom, Marianne is humiliated and breaks up with him.

In the second part of the book, the tables are turned. Connell is the clever loner at university while Marianne is attractive and popular; she has a boy friend. But old habits die hard and soon C & M are back in bed together. This time they break up because Connell loses his job and so has to go back to Sligo for the summer while Marianne, financially independent, is staying at Dublin; Connell can’t bring himself to ask Marianna if he can move in with her and they break up, both under the impression that they have been dumped by the other.

In the third part of the book, Marianne’s new boyfriend Jamie, son of a millionnaire, likes having sadistic sex with her. He doesn’t like Connell, the boy who used to fuck his girlfriend. There are a series of tense exchanges between the two of them; Connell is very protective of Marianne. But when he tries to have sex with her again she pushes him away.

In the fourth part of the book, Marianne is on a year studying in Sweden; her new boyfriend is into bondage. Connell is suffering depression, seeking help from a counsellor, after a schoolfriend committed suicide.

Although the book is presented as a linear narrative, with ‘chapter’ headings being given specific timings, the author jumps around in time so as to keep the thematic significance of each of the starts and ends of these parts. This part four begins with Marianne in Sweden and then jumps to Connell’s depression and then travels back in time to understand the events leading up to Connell’s depression because it is much more important to show the destructive effect of their separation on each of these main characters.

Social criticism:
These are students, so of course they are learning about the adult world, seeing its wrongs and inadequacies and, outraged, struggling to make sense of what they see.

There is observation of gender inequality:

• "Generally I find men are a lot more concerned with limiting the freedoms of women than exercising personal freedom for themselves" (p 99)
• "When you look at the lives men are really living, it’s sad, Marianne says. They control the whole social system and this is the best they can come up with for themselves? They’re not even having fun." (p 99)

There is the eternal debate of the poor versus the rich. This is facilitated by the different backgrounds of the two lovers: Connell is poor (it has to be the man who is boor so as to balance out the power dynamic between the two lovers; this book is nothing is not concerned with reflective symmetry) and Marianne and many of her friends are so effortlessly rich that they can be blind to the problems of not having enough money.

• "Rich people look out for each other, and being Marianne’s best friend and suspected sexual partner has elevated Connell to the status of rich-adjacent: someone for whom surprise birthday parties are thrown and cushy jobs are procured out of nowhere." (p 102)
• "Marianne replaces the yoghurt pot in the freezer now and asks Joanna if she finds it strange, to be paid for her hours at work – to exchange, in other words, blocks of her extremely limited time on this earth for the human invention known as money. It’s time you’ll never get back, Marianne adds. I mean, the time is real. The money is also real. Well, but the time is more real. Time consists of physics, money is just a social construct." (p 112)
• "Fucking lowlife scum, says Jamie. Who, me? Connell says. That’s not very nice. We can’t all go to private school, you know." (p 150)
• "It’s not an easy life out there for a drug addict." (p 150)
• "They could always try, I don’t know, giving up drugs? says Jamie. Connell laughs and says: Yeah, I’m sure they’ve just never thought of that." (p 150)
• "Money, the substance that makes the world real. There’s something so corrupt and sexy about it." (p 166)

Marianne is 'political' and upset by seeing the violence of the world, neatly reflecting her own submission to domestic violence: "She knew she wasn’t at all powerful, and she would live and die in a world of extreme violence against the innocent, and at most she could help only a few people." (p 234)

Reflections and symmetries.
The structure of the book has been carefully constructed to balance and reflect the two main characters.

• The first half of the book shows a reflection. In the first quarter Marianne is a bullied loner and Connell the popular kid at school. In the second quarter these positions are neatly reversed: Marianne is popular and Connell is alone.
• Gender inequality is balanced with social inequality. Marianne is weak and submissive and bullied because she is a woman in a world dominated by men; Connell is the poor student who, mostly, accepts his poverty, in a university world in which the rich dominate.

The book is remarkable for the way in which the inner turmoils and emotional journeys of the two lead characters are reflected in the other characters and in the world around them.

• Lukas "has managed to nurture a fine artistic sensitivity without ever developing any real sense of right and wrong." (p 196)
• Rob: "Nothing had meant more to Rob than the approval of others; to be thought well of, to be a person of status. He would have betrayed any confidence, any kindness, for the promise of social acceptance" (p219)
• Men "control the whole social system and ... they’re not even having fun." (p 99)
• The wars of the world: Marianne"knew she wasn’t at all powerful, and she would live and die in a world of extreme violence against the innocent." (p 234)

There are, of course, moments of foreshadowing to reflect the moments when characters look back on events;

• "He felt a debilitating shame about the kind of person he’d turned out to be" (p 77) will foreshadow Connell's later depression
• "Connell was so beautiful. It occurred to Marianne how much she wanted to see him having sex with someone; it didn’t have to be her, it could be anybody. It would be beautiful just to watch him." (p 12) 
• Rob will show pictures of his naked girlfriend to his schoolmates which foreshadows the photographs Marianne will pose for much later in the book; half way through Marianne and Connell discuss swapping photographs of her naked for pictures of his penis.

The writing

The prose is deliberately mundane: these two have 'normal' thoughts with almost no authorial flourishes. Irishness is signified by a few phrases such as 'obviously' and 'to be fair'. But these young people experience their great love affair in hesitant, scarcely articulate, deliberately flat inner monologues. To emphasise this flatness, the spoken speech is never indicated with quote marks, giving it, with all its hesitations and ordinariness, the same status as inner thought.

This flatness comes through shockingly when Connell half smiles when reflecting on Marianne's humiliation: "It obviously was kind of funny, just how savagely he had humiliated her, and his inability to apologise or even admit he had done it." (p 64)

Nevertheless there are moments when description provides flashes of poetry:

• "His figure was like a long elegant line drawn with a brush." (p 11)
• "When it rains, the city closes in, gathers around with mists; cars move slower, their headlights glowing darkly, and the faces that pass are pink with cold." (p 100)
• "Cherries hang on the dark-green trees like earrings." (p 170)

And there are many more marvellous moments:

• "He presses his hands down slightly further into his pockets, as if trying to store his entire body in his pockets all at once." (p 2)
• "Any time he has had sex in real life, he has found it so stressful as to be largely unpleasant" (p 5)
• "He seemed to think Marianne had access to a range of different identities, between which she slipped effortlessly. This surprised her, because she usually felt confined inside one single personality, which was always the same regardless of what she did or said." (p 13)
• "He would think of her small wet mouth and suddenly run out of breath, and have to struggle to fill his lungs." (p 25)
• "He started telling her that he loved her. It just happened, like drawing your hand back when you touch something hot. She was crying and everything, and he just said it without thinking. Was it true? He didn’t know enough to know that. At first he thought it must have been true, since he said it, and why would he lie? But then he remembered he does lie sometimes, without planning to or knowing why." (p 50)
• "Unable to form such straightforward views or express them with any force, Connell initially felt a sense of crushing inferiority to his fellow students, as if he had upgraded himself accidentally to an intellectual level far above his own, where he had to strain to make sense of the most basic premises." (p 70)
• "Most people were not actually doing the reading. They were coming into college every day to have heated debates about books they had not read." (p 71)
• "Back home, Connell’s shyness never seemed like much of an obstacle to his social life, because everyone knew who he was already" (p 76)
• "In college she often feels there’s no limit to what her brain can do, it can synthesise everything she puts into it, it’s like having a powerful machine inside her head." (p 88)
• "Trying to unbutton one of Connell’s shirt buttons, not even in a sexy way, but just because she was so drunk and high. Also she hadn’t managed to fully undo the button yet." (p 90)
• "She wants to tell him things. But it’s too late now, and anyway it has never done her any good to tell anyone." (p 123)
• "I didn’t need to play any games with you, she says. It was real. With Jamie it’s like I’m acting a part, I just pretend to feel that way, like I’m in his power. But with you that really was the dynamic, I actually had those feelings, I would have done anything you wanted me to." (p 139)
• "She looks in his eyes, where his pupils are swollen to round black bullets. Yes, she says. They’re huge. He strokes her hand again and says more quietly: Oh well. They get like that when I see you anyway." (p 149)
• "The commodity market they passed off as friendship." (p 210)
• "Life is the thing you bring with you inside your own head." (p 208)
• "Life offers up these moments of joy despite everything." (p 228)
• "Cruelty does not only hurt the victim, but the perpetrator also, and maybe more deeply and more permanently." (p 232)
• "You learn nothing very profound about yourself simply by being bullied; but by bullying someone else you learn something you can never forget." (p 232)
• "If people appeared to behave pointlessly in grief, it was only because human life was pointless" (p 232)

In summary, this is a beautifully written book. I don't feel this critique has done it justice. Yes, I found it difficult to believe the character of Connell and there is a little part of me that still feels that he has to have that character so that the story can have reversals and pitfalls, but the fact that I have spent so much time trying to understand him and Marianne suggests that the author has created two enormously real and complex and three-dimensional characters. The overall structure with its first half reflection is obvious but the multiple reflections and symmetries within the text are brilliantly executed. The prose is flat but deliberately so: this book is about normal people even though they are very far from ordinary.

I just want to shout: for goodness sake Connell go to Blarney and kiss that bloody stone!

May 2020

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God