When I heard Sally Rooney’s novel Normal People was being adapted for the small screen, I felt both excited and nervous. I devoured the book in two days last Christmas – quite an achievement for me as I’ve never been a voracious reader of fiction. I generally prefer a juicy political memoir over a Charles Dickens, and often carry the same Penguin Classic around in my rucksack for months on end. Not so with Normal People – the only reason I had it in my bag at all after the Christmas holidays was to lend it to friends and work colleagues, who enjoyed it just as much.
For the uninitiated – where have you been? Living under a rock? Dealing with a global pandemic? Then I’ll fill you in quickly: Normal People tracks the contemporary love story of Marianne and Connell, who we join in their final year at high school in Sligo. Friendless rebel Marianne is materially privileged but contends with an unhappy and abusive homelife, Connell is the popular poster-boy of the class and star of the school football team. Connell’s mum, Lorraine, is a part-time cleaner for Marianne’s family, a circumstance which allows this unlikely pair of lustful teenagers to grow closer in secret. Later, we follow them to Dublin’s hallowed Trinity College, where Sally Rooney herself studied.
I was stunned by Rooney’s extraordinary ability to encapsulate the bumpy road of young love in all of its obsessive, complex and contradictory messiness. I found it compelling and utterly relatable – a true reflection of human nature.
Which brings me back to why I felt nervous ahead of watching the TV version. Would the text translate well into a screenplay? Would it maintain the introspective intensity of the original, plunging us deep inside the characters’ heads, without resorting to rewriting or inventing new passages of spoken dialogue? Many pages in the book are given over to Marianne and Connell doing or saying very little (this lack of communication is, incidentally, often the cause of their misunderstandings). Would the TV adaptation allow enough space in the drama for their inner thought processes to come across? Especially when many producers might be tempted to take a little too literally Hitchcock’s famous mantra “Drama is life with the boring bits cut out”. For this I wanted what would normally be seen as the ‘boring bits’ left in – a lingering look, a silent tear, the tentative awakenings of sexual desire given the time and space needed to amount to the same effect onscreen.
I needn’t have worried. The series – now available on BBC iPlayer – is an absolute triumph. Lead actors Daisy Edgar-Jones as Marianne and Paul Mescal as Connell are perfectly cast. They have an irresistible chemistry that feels a million times more authentic than many Hollywood-infected portrayals I’ve seen – no doubt helped by brilliant direction from Lenny Abrahamson and Hettie Macdonald. The intense suffocation felt by the two protagonists is reflected by the style of cinematography – extreme close-ups of their faces throughout, exposing every nuance of emotion. And the 12-part structure, divided into segments between 20-30 minutes long, allows an episodic rhythm to develop that feels neither to slow nor too fast. It really is as perfect as I could have imagined it to be.
If you haven’t seen it, I can’t recommend it highly enough. If you have seen it, did you like it as much as I did? And your recommendations for what I should binge-watch next, please…
