We start this month’s Six Degrees Of Separation with Normal People by Sally Rooney, a novel it’s been impossible to ignore since the BBC adaption went live a few weeks ago.
I’ve not read it but do have a copy of the book, having had it thrust into my hands by a very enthusiastic niece. Will I read it? Probably at some point though when a novel has garnered as much attention as this one has, I tend to lose interest.
It’s about a complex relationship that begins when Marianne and Connell are at school together. Their lives weave in and out of each other as students at Trinity College, Dublin.
On-off relationship. University students. Sound familiar? It should do because this is the territory of another best selling book (and another successful film): One Day by David Nicholls.
The novel visits the lives and relationship of two people who get together as new graduates at Edinburgh University. The narrative spans a couple of decades with each chapter focusing on their situation on a single date: 15 July (St Swithin’s Day). While their friendship endures, coincidences and misunderstandings keep conspiring to prevent it flourishing into something more.
One Day reminded me of another artfully constructed novel about missed opportunities and the choices we make in life. The Versions of Us by Laura Barnett imagines three versions of one woman’s life, starting from an episode on a day when she is cycling to a university lecture. Each version stems from a decision she makes on that day and asks ‘what if this had happened instead, what if she hadn’t missed that opportunity?“.
Opportunities of course are not the only things in life that go missing.
In Elizabeth Is Missing by Emma Healey it’s not things, but people who have gone missing. Ninety-year-old Maud had a sister called Sukey who disappeared without trace seventy years earlier. Now Maud’s long-term friend Elizabeth seems to have gone missing. No-one believes her but Maid is convinced something is wrong and she will not rest until she finds an answer.
A missing girl leads me to Kate Hamer’s debut novel, The Girl in the Red Coat , in which a young girl wanders away from her mother during a story-telling festival, and is abducted by a religious extremist. This is a dark psychological novel that cleverly alludes to the Little Red Riding Hood fairy tale.
Every time I see the title of that book I think of the film Don’t Look Now, a thriller based on a short story by Daphne du Maurier in a 1971 collection of the same title. The story depicts a married couple who visit Venice in the wake of the accidental death of their daughter. Traumatised by grief, the husband begins to experience mysterious sightings, including the figure of a small child wearing a red coat similar to the one his daughter was wearing when she died.
It’s a story that follows some of the conventions of the Gothic ghost story as does my final choice in this chain, which also happens to be a short story.
The Turn of The Screw by Henry James was originally viewed as simply a spooky story about the experience of a young governess and children in her care who are tormented by two ghosts at an isolated country manor house. Later interpretations suggest that the ghosts are hallucinations, the products of a delusional mind.
So that’s my #6Degrees; moving from a novel of love to a dark about a disturbed mind. From Normal People to maybe An Abnormal Person?? It wasn’t the chain I originally planned but as I was writing it, entirely different connections came to mind. Not sure what that says about the condition of my own imagination!
Six Degrees of Separation is a meme hosted by Kate over at Books Are My Favourite and Best. It works like this: each month, a book is chosen as a starting point and linked to six others to form a chain. A book doesn’t need to be connected to all the titles on the list, only to the one next to it in the chain.
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