This was published 4 years ago
Normal People makes you want to shake its tortured lovers out of it
By Karl Quinn
The fact Sally Rooney is one of the producers of Normal People, the series based on her best-selling novel of the same name, and a co-writer of many of its 12 episodes, should give fans of the book comfort. It changes the structure (to something more straightforwardly chronological) and some plot points, but it’s as faithful an adaptation as any but the most pedantic fan could wish for.
This is, at core, a simple story of the on-off-on-off relationship between rich-girl Marianne (Daisy Edgar-Jones) and working-class Connell (Paul Mescal) from their last year of high school in Sligo, in the west of Ireland, to their mid-20s at university in Dublin.
Romance would be the wrong word, though; theirs is a tortured love affair, riven with self-doubt, hesitation, misunderstandings and miscommunications. Watching it, I was torn between wanting to shake the pair of them out of it, to urge them to just speak what they feel and see how much better everything might turn out, and on the other hand cringing in recognition at the mess I made of my own life at a similar age (of course, I’ve got it all working just perfectly now…)
Most of the episodes run around 30 minutes, which is tight for a drama but well-judged; the tension and frustration wrought by the pair’s missteps and their separate and shared struggles to find a path to happiness is so intense that any longer would be unbearable. At a fraught half-hour, you’re likely to keep coming back in the hope they will finally crack the code.
The two young leads are superb. Edgar-Jones – who is 21 and English – has more work under her belt (in the TV series War of the Worlds and Cold Feet) than Mescal – who is 24 and Irish – but both are largely unknown. That’s unlikely to remain the case for much longer.
When we first meet them at high school, Marianne is smart, surly, sharp-tongued and aloof, while Connell is smart, athletic (a star of the Gaelic football team), and popular, though a lad of few words, most of them mumbled.
Daisy Edgar-Jones as Marianne and Paul Mescal as Connell in the TV adaptation of Sally Rooney's acclaimed novel Normal People.Credit: Stan
Their attraction is obvious – to the viewer at least – but when they finally hook up they are determined to keep it secret from their peers. For Marianne, it seems to have something to do with her disdain for them (which is itself a self-protective posture), while for Connell it’s a fear of reputational damage masquerading as respect. He talks a good game about treating women well, but his behaviour towards Marianne in the public sphere is appalling.
That might have been the end of things were it not for the strength of their attraction. It’s physical (and there are a lot of sex scenes in this show), but it’s also deeper than that: they get each other, even though they often don’t. Flawed as that connection is, no one else comes close.
There’s a welcome acknowledgement of the role income inequality can play in wrecking relationships, and of the corrupting influence of low self-esteem. And there are other layers of darkness too: Connell’s struggle with depression as he moves from the centre of things in Sligo to the margins in Dublin; Marianne’s descent into masochism, not because she enjoys it but because she thinks it’s what she deserves; the dysfunction of her family life, in which the havoc wrought by a violent father reverberates long after his death. The Notebook this is not.
No doubt some will accuse Normal People of wallowing in teen angst, but to me it rings absolutely true, and is beautifully done. Rooney has been called “the voice of her generation”, but that does this story a disservice. It’s for anyone, of any generation, who has ever come to the realisation that without self-acceptance even the fiercest of loves is doomed.
The entire season of Normal People is on Stan.
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