2018 – “Normal People” by Sally Rooney

Normal People by Sally Rooney is about Marianne and Connell. Connell’s mother works for Marianne’s mother as a cleaner and the two teenagers both attend the same school. Connell is very popular and Marianne is not. They start a relationship but Connell destroys it because he doesn’t want anyone else to know that they are involved with one another. They attend the same university where now Marianne is popular and Connell is not. They are friends and occasional lovers, tied together by their past and an attraction that they seem to spend all their time denying.

The book is a series of encounters between Marianne and Connell into their early twenties and it also follows a number of their friends. As their situation and mental health changes over the years so too does their relationship with each other and with family and friends. They seem perfect for one another but yet their interactions actually hurt each other and prevent that ideal relationship developing – although this doesn’t prevent them having a lot of sex. Both of them are very messed up – Marianne has been abused and seeks out abuse in relationships whereas Connell is clinically depressed. Neither realises for quite some time what the other is going through and neither of them understands their own issues either.

This has been a very successful book and has also been serialised on the BBC (I haven’t seen the TV series) but somehow it didn’t engage me. Although I went to school myself and then on to university I didn’t recognise the lives lived by these young people. This is probably because my experience was more years ago than I want to think about but I am sure that not all our young people are drinking as much as or are as obsessed by sex as the characters in this book. Most of the story is told in conversation and that leads to something which really annoyed me about the book (personal niggle) – the author used no speech marks and the direct speech was not separated from the rest of the text in any way. Again this might be because I am too old but I find the conventions of how we record our stories useful so that normally I don’t have to think about them – in this book I was continually trying to work out who was speaking and if this was actually speech at all. This was not helped by the book also being told in the present tense which is becoming more popular and which I also don’t really like.

This was definitely not a book for me and it is likely that I am not the audience for which it was written. I found both characters unengaging and was continually annoyed by their appalling decision making. I thought that the style and formatting of the book made it harder for me to enjoy the story. The novel made the Man Booker longlist and has been highly acclaimed but it left me cold and unsatisfied – by the end I just didn’t care about this couple or their friends.