The TV adaptation of Sally Rooney’s Normal People arrives on RTÉ bearing high expectations. Much of this weight would fall on Marianne and Connell’s firsts – their first scene, kiss, the first time they have sex – as it would indicate whether this adaptation was likely to work or not.
The first two episodes deliver on the book’s promise. The first sounds we hear in the show are of indistinct chatter in a school hallway. Marianne Sheridan passes Connell Waldron, who gazes at her. His look is brief but intense. At her locker, Marianne scans Con, her eyes equally as inflamed. There is yearning there already.
The opening scenes are lowkey but revealing. Subtle glances and minute details will tell this story. It proceeds slowly but panoramically, moving with ease between their public and private worlds, transitioning gracefully between Marianne and Con and bursting into life when they come together.
Their lives are nothing alike. They move in different social spheres. Con, though shy, is popular, intelligent and a talented GAA player. Marianne is friendless. She speaks when spoken to, primarily to return acerbic comments to cruel detractors or irritating teachers. “Don’t delude yourself – I have nothing to learn from you”, she tells one teacher. This line, like many, is lifted verbatim from the novel.
Social lives aside, Con and Marianne belong to different classes. Marianne lives in the proverbial mansion on the hill, which Con’s mother Lorraine cleans. It is here that they can meet and talk beyond the boundaries of school and the judgements of their classmates. This space provides them with a privacy that allows their intimacy to flourish.
Here, one day, Con tentatively asks Marianne what she meant when she told him she liked him. She confirms the romantic intimations of her words, and they share their first kiss. Con asks her not to mention it to anyone in school. She has no one to tell.
Their first kiss sparks a clandestine romance that develops throughout the second episode. Their relationship is conducted in the privacy of their unoccupied homes, on scarcely populated beaches and in the confines of derelict houses.
Their relationship is theirs alone – nobody else in Carricklea knows of it. This accentuates the depth of their connection but also taints it. In public their paths often cross but their words do not. Some of Con’s friends hurtle abuse towards Marianne. Con never participates but nor does he ever stand up for her.
Her social standing leaves him fearful of being publicly associated with her. She’s good enough to sleep with but not be seen with. It is our first glimpse of Con’s horrible inability to separate someone’s merit from their status and his detrimental belief in the importance of the opinions of others.
Already we begin to resent him for it. In one of the early episodes most touching but painful scenes, he jokes that, once they’re in Trinity (the only mention thus far of a College that plays a crucial role later in the story), Marianne would pretend not to know him – reversing the actuality of their relationship. A hurt Marianne tells him: “I would never pretend not to know you, Connell.”
Already the power imbalance in their relationship is visible. While visiting the derelict house, Marianne tells Con that “I would lie down here, and you could do anything you wanted to me”. The comparative line in the book – “she would have lain on the ground and let him walk over her body if he wanted, he knew that” – remains unspoken.
The transition to a visual medium perhaps demands such feelings be brought to the surface. There is nonetheless something uncomfortable about making explicit in their relationship that which was only implicit in the book, especially given the subject matter of this line. The emphasis in both instances is clear: this relationship is as potentially destructive and dangerous as it is passionate and beautiful.
Episode two ends on this scene, flickering with some of the trouble to come. It is not dishonest to describe the second episode as primarily a series of sex scenes interrupted by exchanges of dialogue. Rather than seem gratuitous, however, these moments are irreplaceable: they convey what words can’t.
These sex scenes – full of ragged breaths, glistening sweat and ecstasy induced head-tilts – are vivid. They make the lust between Marianne and Con palpable but they also demonstrate their shared tenderness and mutual vulnerability.
There is hardly a scene or line in the novel without a relatively faithful reduplication in the show and for good reason. This makes the minor deviations all the more interesting. In the novel it’s only speculation that Marianne washed her blouse in the school sink: here it’s fact, emphasising that she doesn’t give a damn what others think of her.
This relationship is as potentially destructive and dangerous as it is passionate and beautiful
Anything that might contaminate the air of romance – such as Con recommending The Communist Manifesto or deriding the injustice of large houses laying derelict – are also discarded. Rooney is a self-proclaimed Marxist and yet in Normal People such references always felt more sheen than substance. There is nothing sexy about politics and the show wisely steers clear of anything that could distract from Con and Marianne’s relationship.
For this relationship is the chief lure of the book and of the show. Rooney is masterful at probing her characters’ psychologies and showing how the tremors of our actions ripple through our lives.
Normal People is structured around this preoccupation. The show understands this, and tactfully replicates it from its beginning. It’s in every scene shared by Mescal and Edgar-Jones, and it’s in Lenny Abramson’s superb direction: despite their intimacy, each interaction is imbued with a magnitude.
We know that these two will leave indelible marks on one another. The beginning of their relationship is the opening of a new world before these two anxious, young lovers – a world I cannot wait to return to next week.
