‘Normal People’ is true to the book and intensely romantic: Review

There’s a sense of an ending, watching an adaptation of a book you adore. 

Slowly, as scenes you recognise unfurl on screen, the faces formed in the recesses of your imagination turn to dust, ceding their place to new, unfamiliar figures. Hallowed settings bend and contort into strange spaces you no longer recognise.

For this reason, I felt hesitant — nervous, even — hitting play on the BBC/Hulu TV adaptation of Sally Rooney’s bestselling novel Normal People, worried I would be bidding farewell to the characters I had imagined. Thankfully, Normal People feels heart-flutteringly close to the beloved book that I and so many others cleaved to. It is valiantly true to its source. And watching it feels like being reunited with an old friend.

The book needs very little introduction. Even if you didn’t read it, you’ll have seen its distinctive cover pop up all over your Instagram feed, you’ll have spotted it on trains and buses, on restaurant tables. If you did read it, you’ll likely have an opinion on it. Some preferred Rooney’s previous book, Conversations With Friends, some didn’t warm to the book at all, and others — like me — felt an affinity to it that I hadn’t felt for another book for quite some time. 

Set in County Sligo and Dublin, Ireland, Normal People tells the story of Marianne, who’s superlatively bright but a social pariah at school, and her relationship with Connell, who’s whip-smart, supremely popular, and universally admired by all. Under normal circumstances, the unspoken rules of high school popularity dictate that the two wouldn’t so much as cross paths — let alone anything else. But Marianne and Connell know each other outside of school. Connell’s mum is the cleaner at Marianne’s family home. And when Connell stops by to pick up his mum from work — the pair get to know one another, if you catch my drift. 

Problem is, Connell asks Marianne not to tell anyone at school what’s going on between them. She is stashed away, out of sight, so Connell doesn’t have to admit to his friends that he’s sleeping with the most despised girl in school. Connell wounds Marianne deeply when he asks another, much more popular girl to the Debs — the formal ball at the end of high school. Marianne nurses her hurt privately, and Connell doesn’t realise his mistake until it’s too late. When they next see each other at Trinity College, Dublin, things are very different for them both. But their story doesn’t end there, to say the very least.

You don’t just feel like you’re in the room, you feel like you’re the one being kissed.

Relative newcomers Daisy Edgar-Jones and Paul Mescal star as Marianne and Connell, and their chemistry is not only palpable, but captivating to watch. You don’t just feel like you’re in the room, you feel like you’re the one being kissed. Not only that, there are long, lingering silences that you can drive a bus through. The camera wields shallow depth of field like an emotionally manipulative microscope, fixing on their expressions as they stare into space, deep in thought. 

Directed by Lenny Abrahamson (Room, Frank) climactic moments are stretched out, prolonged until the sexual tension feels as if it will shatter the screen you’re watching on. Mescal nails Connell’s beguilingly bashful charm, he has an affable awkwardness to him that encapsulates the not-quite-sure-of-oneselfness of youth. Edgar-Jones evokes every glimmer of darkness and depth that Rooney infused into the words on the page for Marianne. Both Mescal and Edgar-Jones portray characters as close to the book as you could ever hope for. 

Just as the novel provoked a visceral heartache, you physically feel things as you watch this realistic depiction of young love unfold before your eyes. Rooney actually wrote the Normal People scripts, along with Lady Macbeth writer Alice Birch, and it shows. This adaptation captures the ubiquitous end-of-the-world emotions that come with your first experience of rejection, of being wounded in love, and of loving someone who’s with someone else. Rooney deftly weaves these emotions into the fabric of the book, but on-screen they feel even more prominent, transporting you to memories of your own experiences. 

In the episodes set in Sligo, I watched Marianne’s high school experience with a gut-wrenching feeling of close acquaintance. Marianne isn’t a high school outcast in the sense that she’s invisible, sliding beneath people’s radar. She is, instead, a figure of scorn, intensely disliked because she is smart and because she knows it. She is called ‘ugly’ and a ‘bitch’ as she wanders the hallways minding her business. To be associated with her publicly is so unthinkable that Connell literally doesn’t think to even ask her to the Debs. 

Anyone who’s ever been name-called in high school for being smart, for reading feminist books, or for simply not conforming to the standards required to be deemed palatable by their peers, will watch Marianne with a sense of familiarity. And anyone who’s ever felt incongruous, misunderstood, and not ‘the right kind’ at a university brimming with people more privileged than themselves will recognise instantly what Connell is going through.

Before watching, know this: there will be feelings, and plenty of them. You might cry (I certainly did). You might see your own experience in amongst the drama. You might remember past loves, past heartbreaks. You might, for a brief moment, remember what life and love was like before COVID-19. And for that, you will feel thankful, young again, alive, and no longer numb. 

Normal People is available to stream on BBC iPlayer now and from April 29 on Hulu.