After the world became obsessed with the BBC series 'Normal People', based on the novel by Sally Rooney, her name felt like an echo amongst fellow bookworms and writers. Normal People provided the perfect romance that a lot of us were missing during our days in isolation, with the Irish town setting and school-girl crush narrative, but it was the Sex scenes that were the most talked about. They were being portrayed so realistically, which is often rare on our screens. With talk around consent and first time' sexual experiences, it felt like the modern, romantic sex- positive story that we all needed.
With this in mind, when Rooney's new novel was released in October, I thought I'd give it a try. The book follows four friends living in the Dublin area. Main characters Alice, Felix, Eileen and Simon are all still young, but it’s no secret that life is catching up with them. They lust for each other and then mislead each other. They get together and they fall out with one another. They have sex, they panic about sex, They find both their friendships and the world they all live in, daunting.
The book masters the art of dialogue and the first thing I noticed when I began to read the first chapter, was that Sally Rooney doesn't use speech marks, like, at all! At first, it bothered me that the entire book was technically grammatically incorrect, but when I realised how present dialogue was throughout the entire novel, it felt like the lack of speech marks made the narrative flow so smoothly. The dialogue makes up most of the story and so, without this, it felt a lot less choppy. Although it was so frustrating when I found myself clinging onto every last word of their conversations, just waiting for the characters to say how they really feel about each other. Internally Screaming "FOR THE LOVE OF GOD, TELL HIM YOU LOVE HIM AND YOU WANT HIS CHILDREN, BECAUS I KNOW I DO" when Eileen wasn't being truthful with Simon.
The sex-positivity was not something I found in common in this novel to the things I'd heard with her other books. If anything, I found the sex to be extremely cringe and unrealistic. One minute there would be normal, dry dialogue and the next it would be 'I'm gonna cum' and it just didn't seem to make sense to me- if only it were that easy. A lot of the sex scenes included dialogue, that wasn't even sexual but seemed to turn the guy on as though her simply talking about waking up in the morning and having her breakfast was the sexiest thing alive! I found that often, the characters would have such a meaningful exchange and it would be ruined by an unnecessary sex scene. I wonder if this was something Rooney felt she had to continue after the success of 'Normal People' and its raunchiness, or if it’s simply to convey how their sexual desires would overcome their emotions and often cause chaos amongst their relationship.
Something I loved about the novel was the constant change in perspectives between all four characters, predominantly Alice and Eileen, as it really helped you to see the flaws of each character and at times their irrational thoughts and behaviours. Towards the start, I found the exchange over email pretty long winded and simply irritating. Whilst I understand, that as millennials, they are constantly worrying about the world they live in, enthralled by politics and global issues like climate change. I am glad, if anything that this was mentioned because it seems relevant to the times, it has become that sort of grey cloud that dooms over us all in recent years. It recognises the fear that young people live in when thinking about their future. At times it was very philosophical and it asks significant questions about what it means to even be a human on planet earth. But at times it felt long-winded and made too may specific historical and philosophical references which came across pretentious and for me at least, hard to follow. Towards the end of the novel I came to look forward to hearing the other friends response to an event that took place in their life through these emails and I think it was poignant that the last few pages were written in that format, as it was a continuous conversation between friends. My heart wrenched at the line "Because when we should have been reorganising the distribution of the world's resources and transitioning collectively to a sustainable economic model, we were worrying about sex and friendship instead. Because we loved each other too much and found each other too interesting". It just proves, with everything in this life, all your thoughts and fears become irrelevant, when it all boils back down to love. We can't escape it.
My favourite thing about the entire novel was that one scene when Eileen sees Simon at the wedding and the narrative does this montage-esque time lapse of their life over the years where it unfolds a huge amount of their adolescence with one another, for almost an entire chapter. This section of the book literally took my breath away, I stopped at the end of the chapter and felt goose bumps all over my body. It was one of the most sweet and romantic things I've ever read. A whole lifetime flashed before her eyes. They loved one another, but for whatever reason kept denying their feelings and in that moment it was as though there was a huge sense of clarity; They were always meant to be with each other.
I ended the book feeling satisfied with the outcome of their relationships, it felt realistic, as well as expected, but I definitely wasn't expecting a dramatic ending. The book felt as though it was more of a snapshot of these four friends lives than a story with a plot. For any Rooney sceptics out there I'd recommend it, if you're looking for a steamy, chaotic romance novel in your life, this could be just that.
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