Normal People

It’s alright guys; I’ve read the book.  Now we can talk about Normal People.  Fair enough, most normal people finished talking about Normal People a few weeks ago.  At one point, a greeting as common as “Hello” or “I think your mute button is on” became “Have you seen Normal People?”  It was, if anything, completely normal to discuss your response to this show and, in particular, its gratuitous sexual content, before proceeding with whichever Zoom call you had dialled into that day.  But no, I seemed to have been taken by the notion that, while my curiosity was of course triggered by all and sundry’s compulsion to signal that they had been watching along, I would rise above all this popularity and universal experience by pulling my smuggest face, adjusting my voice to be more patronising than normal, and declaring: “No I’ve not been watching Normal People.  I’m going to read the book first.”  I’m all for gratuity.  I only got into Big Brother twenty years ago as my teenage self read an outraged newspaper article about nudity on the television.  The constant threat of an unneeded shag helped to suspend disbelief each time a dragon is mentioned in Game Of Thrones.  I came to Elite for some foreign language swearing and high school high jinks, and stayed for the constant erotica.  But the sensible me felt a need to impose a literary barrier before joining in with everyone else in gawping at the body parts onscreen.

Once I finally got hold of the book, though, it was a great read.  A dear friend promised to lend me the book, but subsequently either forgot to bring the book to our lockdown park walks, or I would forget to take the book with me on leaving, or we wouldn’t think about the book for a few weeks while I was lost in reading something else (such as the book Unorthodox is based on), or we’d just lose all hope that I would ever get my hands on the book in order to read the book.  But then I got the book and I went ahead and read it (the book).  That task out the way, I was able to catch up and dive into iPlayer to see how everything came to life televisually.

On reflection, consuming a drama straight after devouring the book from which it sources its material probably isn’t a flawless approach.  There isn’t sufficient distance to be surprised and delighted by elements of the novel you had forgotten.  You’re only really checking off the adaptation against the pages you’ve just torn through.  If this were A-Level English, we’d have just finished taking it turns to read the book out loud in the classroom together (worryingly highlighting that a significant number of 18-year olds are not fluent readers) before the teacher gave up hope and wheeled in the big VCR so we could sit through the BBC production over and over until the end of term.

My own stupidity aside, Normal People is a beautiful series of filmmaking.  Every shot is a luxury.  Set in and around Sligo and Dublin in Ireland (plus some Italy and Sweden, reminding me constantly that Ireland gets to stay in Europe), the mundane looks cinematic.  Even drizzle takes on a sexiness.  But part of the reason our settings all crackle before our very eyes is the truly gripping tension of our central story.  Normal People is the tale of a relationship between Marianne and Connell.  Almost banal in its secondary school origins, we follow our protagonists as they navigate university and beyond, at once incredibly compatible and somehow prone to the no banana part of an idiom that starts with the words close and but.  As I read the book, I hadn’t seen any stills from the show, so Marianne and Connell remained faceless to me.  But, on starting episode one, I was able to conclude immediately that this was perfect casting.  As Marianne, Daisy Edgar-Jones perfectly captures what it feels like not to fit in at school but to find your niche at college.  Walking round Trinity in her velvet jackets, she is almost everyone I went to university with.  She’s utterly believable when navigating banal and awkward social moments, particularly when coming across Connell’s friends one New Year’s Eve in a pub in their hometown.  I felt I was literally in that moment.  As a character, Marianne is damaged by her family.  I obsessed over the exact situation here.  Her mother’s coldness, her brother’s fixations – where do these come from?  The fact we never seem to get the full picture (unless I was looking at my phone when this got explained) makes the circumstances all the less generic and all the more credible.

Meanwhile, Paul Mescal must wrestle (and win) with Connell’s complexity, ensuring we buy him not just as the sporty lads’ lad at school, but the keen reader, the keen writer and the struggling student.  Some of their dialogue is drawn out to the point of snapping, but you don’t wish for them to hurry up (unlike the constant pausing for effect in Skins) because every swallow, hesitation, eyeball swivel, neck tendon tightening, hair adjustment, all of this washes over you in a way that brings you into the heart and the heat of the emotion.  And yes sure, just as the book is frank about their sexual interaction simply because it forms a significant part of any relationship of this kind, we have a lot of opportunities to see their whole bodies emote and perform with a full-on and unblinking focus.  It’s not all vanilla, so this is certainly the element that got tongues wagging, but given how certain I am that my neighbours’ children can see my TV screen through the window, I could probably have sacrificed about 50% of the slapping and tickling and lost nothing of the sentiment.

I’ll spoil none of the plot beyond its premise, but I will comment on my inability to understand the motives of either lead at various points in their relationship’s journey.  They do things that will make your soul wail in frustration.  You yearn for a glimpse of resolution, which means that even a slither of potential happiness for them brings on floods of tears (if you’re the kind of person who only experiences emotion in relation to TV shows).

I’m off to find the soundtrack on Spotify, looking forward to the next time I can drop into conversation that I’ve read the book and watched the TV programme when it comes to Normal People.  Basically, I’ll win.  I’ll leave you with some quick mentions of the supporting cast, simply because they’ve left a similarly deep impression on me.  Sally Rooney’s book enhances its own reality with such believable friends for Connell and Marianne.  Joanna (Eliot Salt) charms with every line and doesn’t seem to be acting at all (a similar comment was made about I May Destroy You), whereas lovely Karen from the school days deserves far more backstory.  I’m still creeped out by Fionn O’Shea’s horribly recognisable turn as the terrible boyfriend, even though his behaviour is sadly commonplace in some of the dreadful people I have come across in my life.  And that’s the strength in this drama – it’s at once normal yet abnormal in its familiarity.  The everyday elements set up a level of recognition, but the specific and unusual details enhance that reality.  This isn’t the movies, where films end with co-stars kissing, leaving us to envision them not parting till death.  This is much realer life.