This novel does get a
lot better in its final seventy pages, but for a couple of hundred pages it is
simply too normal and I did not want to turn those pages. It’s a regular,
non-experimental novel, regular length, regular structure. It is dialogue-based
between a small cast of main characters and the dialogue is fine, but not
extraordinary. The characterisation is fine, but not exceptional. The plot is
repetitive - that’s the point - though with revelations introduced, but perhaps not enough of them.
It’s a coming of age
story or, more grandly, a Bildungsroman
set in a contemporary Ireland from which the priests and the fascists have been
eliminated and the currency is the €uro. It’s a novel which could only have been written there in the fairly recent past; fifty years ago, it would have
been banned even if conceivable and the author would have gone to live in a
free country.
The core story of the
on-off relationship between Marianne and Connell from school days to graduate
studies is well developed, often delicately so, and only towards the end did I feel there were
moments of authorial intrusion into their evolving consciousness - pages
198-99; p 221; p 239, for example. There are very few jokes and I suspect that
the humour at page 235 where a man lays down the second half of a football
match for his woman is unintentional.
For an older reader
like me, there were a few puzzles. I get the bit about being interconnected via
social media, but Rooney’s characters live in a world where gossip is the norm,
and where people are very anxious about their current gossip-status. Is it
really that bad? Is that what it’s like for normal people? Likewise, they cling
to their groups, so that the school group lives on even after everyone has gone
their separate ways. For some people, the rule is surely never to go back but
rather to keep on moving away. In this novel, no one does that even if they
travel and study in foreign countries.
The novel could be compared to Elif Batuman's The Idiot about which I wrote here on 24 June 2018, but whereas I did not finish Batuman's book, I did finish this one.
