Two people and a phone signal problem

I went in braced to dislike this. I'd been told it was about two clever people failing to say one sentence to each other for four years, which it is, and that is normally my idea of a wasted evening.

What got me is how physical it is. Not just the sex, though the sex is written better than almost anyone manages — unembarrassed, specific, and mostly about power rather than about bodies. I mean the whole of it: the cold in that house in Sligo, the smell of chlorine, Marianne's kitchen, the particular way a room feels once you've said the wrong thing in it. I read most of it in two long sittings under a blanket with a pot of tea going cold at my elbow, and I never once put the radio on, which for me is the actual measure of a book.

The class material is the strongest thread and I think it gets underrated because the romance is louder. His mother cleans her mother's house. That fact sits underneath every single scene between them and it never gets a speech; it simply keeps being true. Connell's terror in Trinity, the sandwich he can't afford, the way he can't tell anyone he's out of money — all of that is exactly right, and I recognised more of it than I'd like to.

A friend lent me her copy with one page corner turned down and no explanation, and when I got there it was the party in Italy, and I texted her a single question mark and she replied, you know. That is the correct way to lend somebody a book.

Where it lost points. The missing punctuation on dialogue is a choice, it mostly works, and I'm still faintly cross about it, because there are two or three places where I genuinely couldn't tell who was speaking and had to count backwards up the page. The pattern also repeats. They misunderstand, they separate, they find each other, they misunderstand. By the fourth turn of it I was ready to reach in and hold them both by the shoulders. And Marianne's family is drawn with a much heavier hand than anything else in the book — everyone else gets shading, they get a spotlight.

I finished it and went straight back to read the first chapter again, which I almost never do, and it's a completely different scene once you know what those two are going to be to each other.

Eight. I liked it more than I expected to and rather less than the people who adore it, and I've been informed by two friends that this makes me a coward. I've made them a fish pie since and they seem to have let it go.