Normal People review: Sally Rooney's compelling adaptation captures the heady, awkward rush of teenage feelings

Daisy Edgar-Jones and Paul Mescal shine in the small screen version of Rooney's hit novel
Vicky Frost28 May 2020

Adapting an acclaimed novel for television is never an easy task - not even when that novel was written by you.

Sally Rooney steps up to the challenge for this BBC/Hulu production of Normal People, her sometimes bleak sometimes tender story of love, sex, shame and power that swept all before it when it hit bookshelves in 2018.

Rooney, writing with Alice Birch, nudges her unlikely lovers off the page and into the clean light of small town west Ireland and the excruciating social hierarchies of the classroom. Marianne, the posh, clever girl from the big house, has no friends and fewer admirers, while Connell — working class, sporty, secretly bright — is taciturn but popular.

The pair spend their schooldays not speaking across a classroom — although nobody is speaking to Marianne, who snarks and sneers with a deeply-buried fury — while their outside lives are linked by a random thread. Connell’s mum cleans for Marianne’s family, and so the teenagers find themselves exchanging awkward sentences in Marianne’s interiors-mag kitchen as she eats ice-cream from the tub.

BBC'S Normal People

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Awkwardness runs through Normal People. Rooney’s prose is all clipped sentences, difficult silences and teenage discomfort, accompanied by the most intimate of internal monologues. On screen, with the constant mutter of doubt and vulnerability left unspoken, some of that glittering edge is lost.

But the result is still something notable. Both Daisy Edgar-Jones and Paul Mescal are compelling here: the long gaps in their conversations crackling with complicated and unresolved emotions; sudden, surprising smiles making you catch your breath.

The show is streaming in 30 minute episodes, but the BBC is broadcasting them in double bills, which seems a better way to let this quiet, slow drama begin to unfurl, and for readers to settle with these familiar and yet not characters.

Over this first hour, we see Marianne and Connell begin to map the edges of their complicated relationship. Director Lenny Abrahamson, Oscar-nominated for Room, captures the heady rush of teenage feelings while finding tenderness and gentle humour in sex unpractised.

BBC/Element Pictures/Hulu

(BBC/Element Pictures/Hulu)

Scenes are washed with beautiful light and silences hang for an age; then, just when you think things are going to take a predictable girl-meets-boy trajectory, something throws things off course again.

Rooney’s novel is relatively short and I was sceptical about whether it needed to be told over six hours (oh, how we thought differently before lockdown!), but while Normal People is slow to start, its unhurried pace becomes a strength.

The more difficult barrier for me is that while Mescal and Edgar-Jones give nuanced performances — Mescal brings depths to Connell beyond my reading of the character in print — they also somehow look like adults in school uniform. They lack some of that essential fragility that marks even the most confident teenagers before they develop the poise of adulthood; that particular vulnerability that can’t be re-conjured.

All 12 episodes are now available on iPlayer. I’d be amazed if I hadn’t watched the whole lot by mid-week -- and to be honest, I’d be surprised if loads of other people hadn’t joined me. Because while I know I should be savouring this quality gift from the BBC, like the novel it comes from, it deserves to be inhaled and savoured in a handful of intense sessions.

Normal People is available to stream in full on BBC iPlayer from April 26. Episodes will air weekly on Mondays on BBC One at 9pm from April 27.

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