The ancient Greeks had a theory about soul-mates. It was said the first humans were spherical and twice the size of present-day humans, and were cut in half by Zeus as a punishment for misbehaviour – literally cut down to size – splitting their souls between two bodies. A variation of the same myth said humans originally had four arms, four legs and two heads, and Zeus split them in two fearing they’d become too powerful. Either way, the outcome was the same: a divided being. This is why (it is said) we all search to find “The One”, the person who will make us whole again, our other half; our soul-mate.
Marianne and Connell are in the same class at school, but they aren’t friends. Marianne “has no friends…is considered an object of disgust. She wears ugly thick-soled flat shoes and doesn’t put make-up on her face.” When Connell visits Marianne’s house to pick up his mum, who cleans for Marianne’s mum, he winds up alone with Marianne in the kitchen. In the course of making awkward conversation, Marianne tells him she likes him. Three weeks later they’re having sex; secretly, of course. At school, Connell “had to avoid looking at Marianne or interacting with her in any way” because “he cared what people thought of him”. Nice.
That was February 2011. By November they’re both at Trinity College, Dublin and the tables are turned: Connell is struggling to make friends and Marianne has lots of friends and a “cool boyfriend…one of these campus celebrities”.
And that’s where it began to lose me. Not Connell…I can understand how “back home…shyness never seemed like much of an obstacle to his social life, because everyone knew who he was already”, but Marianne… ”it’s classic me, I came to college and got pretty.” Is that how it works? (OK, I know Jane Austen does something similar in Persuasion when Anne Elliot’s looks improve after a visit to Lyme Regis – they should put that on the tourist blurb – but I didn’t buy into that either.)
Connell and Marrianne’s on-off relationship plays out over four years to February 2015, which is when the story ends. But are they soulmates? More like “two little plants sharing the same pot of soil.”
Confession time! I struggled with this review, mainly because I can’t work out how I feel about the book. The absence of quotation marks around dialogue, which is meant to create a more flowing reading experience, I found quite jarring – so the opposite effect – although I did get used to it eventually. (The same technique is used by Bernadette Evaristo in Girl, Woman, Other which I’ve reviewed in a previous blog post, and I didn’t mention it in that review so possibly it felt more ‘natural’ in Evaristo’s book).
Once over that hurdle, Rooney’s prose-style is easy-to-read, hypnotic even, and Connell’s observations about his fellow English undergraduates raised a smile of recognition (“eventually he realised that most people were not doing the actual reading. They were coming into college everyday to have heated debates about books they had not read.”). Yet there is no plot as such, no real ending / resolution; and although at times I wanted to give Marrianne and Connell a big hug, mostly I just wanted to bang their heads together.
Hubby’s take (when I explained this) is that Normal People was probably published because of the sex. He might have a point; there is a fair bit of it. Connell “seemed to fit perfectly inside her” and he tells Marianne “I sometimes think God made you for me”. Marianne “has certain proclivities” (getting hit or choked as part of the sex act). Is that “Normal”? Just saying.
Normal People was Sally Rooney‘s second novel. Her fourth novel, Intermezzo, seems to be everywhere at the moment, but after reading Normal People I won’t necessarily be rushing to buy it. Normal People won the Costa Novel of the Year in 2018.
Rating: ** Worth reading
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