Normal People

 Normal People

One of the strange things you notice about Normal People is that Sally Rooney doesn’t use quotation marks for dialogue. For some people, it’s a groundbreaking and genius choice; for others it’s performative creativity and generally unnecessary. I personally believe there’s real purpose in that decision and that it does have a powerful (if subtle) effect on how we connect to the characters. I also think that how the novel has been adapted by Hulu for the screen develops Rooney’s reasoning beautifully, and I’ll explain why. 

When you look at a page in Rooney’s novel you can’t always tell what lines are dialogue and what lines aren’t, at first glance. It's on a closer inspection when things become more clear. For a novel which relies so heavily on its main protagonists’ struggles with communication and connection, blurring the lines between the said and the unsaid in this way makes perfect sense. It’s as if Marianne and Connell don’t ever actually speak to each other but there’s some kind of acute telepathy between them. By removing punctuation for dialogue, Rooney makes it clear to the reader by literally showing - not just through storytelling and characterisation - how these characters are so fluid and seamless and boundless in their connection, but how the lack of clarity they find there is also confusing and unsettling. In some ways I guess we could say that Rooney’s novel is a visual medium in the way it translates its themes and concerns onto the page as we see it. 

On screen we don’t exactly get that same kind of access to Connell or Marianne. Their thoughts and feelings aren’t laid bare in writing, and there’s no narrator to do that work of tying things together for us. We can feel quite isolated watching Normal People, untethered and invisible. Instead, we read faces, bodies, and glances. We read the silent languages - innate, naturally moving. Where Rooney takes away punctuation to express this strange and extraordinary bond between Connell and Marianne, on screen we lose some of the very words themselves. The silences are all the more apparent in the absence of speech, the hurt is all the more painful scrawled across a face and body, the connection all the more tangible in the proximity of bodies. We don’t need words to understand Connell and Marianne when we can see them in front of us, hear them speak to each other, and feel the thoughts and emotions they convey to us. 

At the end of it all, what Normal People hinges on the rise and fall of intimacy, in all its pain and beauty. Reading can often feel like something incredibly intimate. Words which are, in that moment, for your eyes only and yet shared with countless other readers all with their own experiences and opinions. How can a story and its characters possibly stay the same when there are so many different ways to read and know them? Rooney's Marianne and Connell live in worlds of their own which are inexplicably tied to each other and yet totally individual. Perhaps we too can feel that our worlds touch theirs and each others’ in this extraordinary way.