A Warmer View

REVIEW: Normal People TV series

Was I wrong about Normal People? Sometimes it’s hard to tell after the rush of writing something like our previous post whether I was seeing things clearly or just caught up in my own mad Moby-Dick feeling that a wall had been shoved too close to me.

Maybe I should go back and look at the book again, but I’ve had enough of it. It’s a fine achievement overall. The characters are well-drawn; its style, though Not How I Would Have Wrote It, has aesthetic integrity and makes a distinct effect; and it is capable and convincing in the progress of its plot. But my memory of reading it still gives me a queasy feeling. That numb narration, that aimless precarity, that locked-out perspective …

I decided to try the TV series instead, if only to complete my investigation, and I was pleased to find it more palatable than the book. They even changed the ending a little!

Unlike in the book, our eyes are given so much full human form and setting to take in. There are a lot of close-ups, which is appropriate to the book’s cramped perspective, but the show also has visual perspectives the book never offers us.

There is tension and strange quiet …

… longing and grandeur …

… scenes from student life (they summon strong memories) …

… scenes from the bedroom, when the couple is alone …

… and when they are alone themselves …

… Nature is nearby — lazy, gratuitous, splendid, about to end, never-ending …

… and all the inside lighting is so carefully placed …

… and lives alongside phones and laptops so beautifully, so strangely, so naturally-unnaturally …

… and yes this final moment between them is revised and relieved of the horror I found in the book’s ending. They resolve together on their plan for the future, which is still the same, but at least more mutual.

To finally see these characters and the world around them allows them to become objects of more sustained attention and care, and deeper contemplation. They are still infuriating in some of the same ways, but the actors’ sensitive performances make them sympathetic in a way that I found the book could not. In the book there is more menace present, more hardened loneliness. The side characters are more distant and seem more callous. The show has a warmer view.

All those gorgeous images can seem somehow to undertake deeper thinking than the story itself. The filmmakers and the actors have enriched the original material into something more universal and expansive. Lucky Sally Rooney, to have her book delivered into such capable hands!