May the revolution be swift and brutal – class and left politics in Normal People by Sally Rooney

Many thanks to Joe for the following guest review:

I haven’t got a degree in English (it’s on the list) but I’ll try anyway. First up, Normal People is class. I love it. Just finished it last weekend and I am grieving since. I miss it so much. It is haunting me. I think I feel about this book like the teeny boppers used to feel about the Bay City Rollers when I was fourteen. I liked it so much that I am so far refusing to watch the tv version which is on our screens at present. No matter how good, it can’t be as good. Impossible.

Sally Rooney, the author, has been described as a lifelong Marxist in an interview she did with the New Yorker magazine. She’s 29 and from Mayo. This reviewer has aspired to be a Marxist all his adult life but has never managed to actually finish the Communist Manifesto (it’s on the list too). So, long Marxist life to Ms Rooney and long live Mayo Marxism.

The book is first and foremost a love story. The best speech I ever heard at a WP conference was given by Martin Lynch, the Belfast playwright, on a Sunday morning in the late eighties. Martin was trying to get us, I think, to move on from our obsessive hatred of the Provos. He was in good stead in making this argument because in his introduction, one of the things he said, and I quote, was “Indeed, they came to my house to kill me.” But in his speech he said that socialism was fundamentally about love. I agree. But I don’t think Marx would or did. I’m struggling, really struggling, through Marx and Marxism by Gregory Claeys at the moment and one thing I’ve picked up is that Marx’s thought was always developing, always (hopefully) advancing. I think Marx did address love in some way in his earlier stuff. Hopefully I’ll get to more about love in later Marx too.

But back to Normal People. The lovers are Connell and Marianne. They’re in sixth year. He lives with his mammy Lorraine. He’s eighteen, his ma is thirty five, she raised him on her own, the biological da never in the picture, don’t think Connell even knows who his da is. Lorraine works as a cleaner in Marianne’s house for Marianne’s mammy, a rich widowed-young solicitor. Marianne’s family is seriously dysfunctional – she tells Connell her late da used to beat her ma, and beat her (Marianne) too. Her brother is an evil, mean and nasty f***er to his sister. So, class politics – Connell is classically working-class, Marianne classically middle-class. But it’s based somewhere in rural Sligo so they go to the same school (there’s a point there, is there? –kids from different classes in rural towns are more likely to go to the one school whereas in the cities schools are more likely to be less mixed, class-wise). Anyway they’re both really smart and clever, academically. Really smart and clever, mostly in good ways.

Look I won’t synopsise it. Read this book! But the story goes from school in Sligo to college in Trinity in Dublin. And it’s intense and it’s on again, off again. And one of the things that leads to it being off just when it appears to be as blissfully good as it could ever get, is a failure of communication – Connell can’t afford to pay rent for his place for a summer in Dublin and somehow can’t ask Marianne can he stay in hers, even though they have effectively been living together there for months at that stage. So, in the background all the time, and sometimes threatening to come into the foreground, is their different class backgrounds. And that difference clearly weighs on him but he’s not the best at saying out whatever is weighing on him.

Even though back in Sligo she was the outsider in school and he was one of the lads and lasses, in Trinners she fits in more easily. He struggles socially. There’s some good stuff on both their takes on the Dublin middle-class set who predominate in their student milieu.

Marianne then spends quite a bit of time in a relationship with a bloke who’s da ‘not figuratively, but actually’ was one of those who caused the financial crash of 2008. And she let’s him beat her up while they’re having sex. And she asks him to in the first place. It’s only occurring to me now – is this a metaphor? Could be!

Now, slight tangent here but here goes. The stuff I’ve heard and read about the tv series keeps saying that Connell is a GAA player. But he’s not, in the book. He plays soccer for the school team. He scores the goal in a 1-0 win. He has a poster of Steven Gerrard on his wall. And his teenage cousin follows United. The GAA isn’t mentioned once in the novel, that I can recall. They live in Sligo, okay south county Sligo apparently and the GAA is played there but, as we know on this site, in Sligo there’s only one red army and Dublin’s SRFC aren’t Rovers, they’re Shamrocks. So, anyway – danger here! I’m calling out the tv script as selling out on this point – the GAA is representative of safe, official, middle Ireland, soccer is very predominantly a traditional working-class game. Declan Lynch is good on this periodically in the Sindo – in terms of both playing and supporting, soccer is Ireland’s number one sport, but the bourgeois nationalist state loves the cross-class alliance GAA. End of tangent.
So back to class and politics. May the revolution be swift and brutal. That’s what one of them, I can’t remember which, says to the other when the other mentions that they’d been on an anti-austerity march. Great line. However, Rooney then misses the opportunity to set out in detail what the post-revolutionary Marxist-inspired society would look like. This is a fatal flaw in the novel. Only joking. If she did that, I’d be an aspiring Rooneyist instead of an aspiring Marxist. And the novel would be crap. But it’s a great line because it shows that they are leftists in thought and in action, some bit of action anyway. And later, former friends of Marianne from that aforementioned Dublin middle class milieu are heard to decry her tendency to be vocal and opinionated (and maybe domineering?) about issues like Palestine and stuff.

And patriarchy gets a mention too. And the Gospels. I probably know more about the latter than the former. We definitely need more women in the CLR commentariat. And more young people. Sorry, another tangent there.
So I’ll end this review like I started it. Gushing. Anyone who criticises Rooney’s work is in danger of getting cancelled by me. Her first novel, Conversations with Friends, is brilliant too. Again young women with some cool left-wing views. And another novel that I loved was One Day by David Nicholls. And guess what, the heroine in that one is a good progressive leftist too. There’s a pattern starting to emerge here, Joe. Anyway, Rooney is apparently working on her third novel. I can’t wait. She has set the bar so high. The phrase the difficult third album springs to mind. But, bring it on. All power to the Mayo Marxists.