Normal People

Normal People by Sally Rooney
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Sally Rooney’s writing is almost preternaturally easy to read and digest, and I finished this in three days. It starts off as a YA Romeo & Juliet story, but things get more complicated and quite a bit darker when the star-crossed lovers go to university and contrive in various ways to not end up together. Some of this feels like the author pushing her characters around to maintain tension in the story, a way of establishing beyond doubt that these two people belong together by showing how unhappy they are apart. But that drama keeps you reading, so the artifice is forgivable. Rooney’s debut focused on four characters rather than two, and had more surprising and affecting revelations in store for them. This book is more controlled, but also more conventional. Through their love the two misfits feel able to relax into themselves and stop worrying about being weird. That’s sweet. Conversations With Friends had some harder truths in store for the reader, which makes it a finer achievement.

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Women In Love

Women in Love by D.H. Lawrence
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Although a sequel to The Rainbow, this is a very different beast and can largely be read on its own (there are occasional references to previous events in Ursula’s life only to underline how far she has moved beyond them). Ursula shares the stage with her sister and the two men that love them, and each other. The central tension the book explores and ends on is whether marriage is partnership enough, or if other company is required for a fulfilled life. Happily Lawrence’s increasingly chauvinistic attitude is still reigned in here, and his avatar character’s lecturing is ridiculed and mocked, not least by the woman who loves him. It is that ambiguity and multipolarity that makes this a great novel. I think The Rainbow is greater still, laying out its thesis a bit more convincingly, but both books are triumphs and well worth reading.

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