ŷ������

I thought I’d do the ŷ������ Summer Reading Challenge, even though it’s just about winter here in Sherwood. But I think I’ll get away with it, you never see any police around here from one year to the next. Anyway, standards really aren’t what they were, I don’t even think anyone would care. In the old days if you did a summer reading challenge in winter you’d be out the door so fast your feet wouldn’t touch the ground. But these days people have neck tattoos and name their children after brands of paint remover so you can get away with anything.

When I looked at the categories of the reading challenge I had to ditch a couple �� “Read a ŷ������ Choice Winner�� was one �� I mean, sorry ŷ������, not to eat the hand that feeds you and all but those Choice Awards are not my cup of tea at all. Fortunately the other categories fit neatly on to several stubborn denizens of my real life to be read shelves, so off I go.

The category I’m doing here is “Read a ‘most read�� book�� so I consulted the list and I found a copy of one of these popular works in my local Oxfam, and Normal People it is.

NOT THAT NORMAL

This turned out to be a kind of romance but at least it was the unromantic modern version, where we follow a couple from school (she’s rich and unpopular, he’s working class and beloved by all) to university (where it’s the other way round suddenly) and during this long peregrination they’re on-and-off shagging and loving and BFFing and pinging from one thing to the other like pinballs whilst at the same time recoiling in horror from acknowledging the plain fact that they’re made for each other, so they attempt and fail to have actual real boy/girlfriends and the real boy/girlfriends have no idea what’s really going on so this golden couple of Marianne and Connell have a permanent status of IT’S COMPLICATED.

They have angst in their pangst.

The short version of all that is to say that Normal People is the unfunny updated version of When Harry Met Sally or that it’s like if Ross and Rachel had absolutely no sense of humour or any charm at all and were all strictly gloomsville I-am-suffering because life is suffering, woe is us, woe is all of us.

THE MASOCHISM TANGO

In the middle of this wall to wall fraughtness and gnashing of laptops we get to find out that the lovely Marianne has a masochistic streak. When she’s not with Connell she likes her boyfriends to beat her up.

I think it’s now possible to construct a rough and ready scale of female masochism using novels I happen to have read or movies seen. Here are seven female protagonists rated out of ten on the masochism scale

Anastasia Steele in Fifty Shades of Grey...………………………��.3
Eileen Dunlop in Eileen......................................................…��.4
Lee Holloway in Secretary...……………��...………………………��...6
Marianne Sheridan in Normal People...…………………………��.7
Nora in Topping from Below ......…………………��......��...……��.8
Erika Kohut in The Piano Teacher...…………………��......……��..9
O in Story of O...��...………………………��...…………………………��.10

O is the gold standard of female masochism. I can’t see O ever being beaten.

THE WATER FROM THE TAP GOT WARMER

The soundtrack to Normal People I think would be a jarring mixture of Kraftwerk, Leonard Cohen and late Billie Holliday, when her voice was all hoarse and ruined. What Normal People does is to describe at length a hot mess of a relationship in cool, affectless sentences, some of which go way too far with their cool and affectlessness

The outside door closes and Marianne re-enters the kitchen. She rinses her water glass and leaves it upside down on the draining board.

Many pages later

The water from the tap got warmer and Marianne put the plug in the sink and squeezed a little dish soap onto a sponge.

And many pages later

Marianne drank a single cup of black coffee and ordered a croissant which she didn’t finish. Connell had a large ham-and-cheese omelette with two slices of buttered toast, and tea with milk in it.

Meanwhile, our tall handsome working class star student Connell suffers from a book-length inarticulacy that is distressing to witness. He’s all “that was weird��, “I don’t know��, “I’ll have to think about it��, “Kind of�� and “That was weird��.

As regards the plot, there’s not much to see here, it’s really just beads on a string. One thing - I had a problem with Marianne’s family, only a mother and a brother, but they both seem to hate her, for reasons never explained. I mean, give us a hint, Sally. Just a little hint. But you know what, I read this in two big gulps, it was weirdly compelling, similar to another much beloved and not that great campus novel The Secret History. So that’s something. I read many novels that I find extremely putdownable and unpickupable. This was not one of those.

SO, DID YOU LIKE IT?

It’s complicated.

2.5 stars.