Rooney’s mastery of tone is complete, we almost fail to notice as the darkness trickles in and the light starts to fade.įrom the beginning, Marianne and Connell are aware of “the others”. The book switches point of view but it stays very close, so we know how the characters feel but not, somehow, what they are. Connell and Marianne’s feelings are so real they have a shape, they are sometimes experienced as a physical force. Emotions are everything they are forensically described. The fact that Connell and Marianne are elite academics adds to the sense, in the first half of the novel, that we are reading a brilliant young person writing about other young people. One way or another, they are also beautiful people and the reader can, for a while, borrow the glow. There is the pleasure of seeing events unfold and these can be surprising though they are mostly 'normal' as events go the Debs dance, a fight in a petrol station, a game of pool. The pace is deliberate but far from slow. Meanwhile, it is a tremendous read, full of insight and sweetness. Still, there are only two possible destinations: they will, within the unbreakable frame of the narrative, end up together or apart and this is enough tension to keep us turning the page. Marianne and Connell start sleeping with each other again and now we do not know what kind of journey we are on.

It might be another Eugene Onegin, but actually that part of the plot, where the scorned girl becomes the desired young woman, is done by page 93. The story of the novel is the story of their relationship over the next several years, as they finish school and go to college, where Marianne is a social success and Connell merely tolerated by the Trinity types in Dublin. Connell’s mother is Marianne’s mother’s cleaner, but this social difference is masked by the fact that Connell is popular in school and Marianne, being odd, is a bit of a pariah. Marianne and Connell are schoolfriends-with-benefits living in Carricklea, Co Sligo. After the success of Conversations With Friends, Sally Rooney has produced a second novel, Normal People which will be just as successful as it deserves to be: it is superb. It is time to take a sharp inhale, people. Lord be with the days when the job of the critic, especially the Irish critic, was to reassure everyone that a recently successful writer was no good, which is to say not as good as Proust.

Normal people book review