Normal people. An abnormal review.

Dawson’s Creek with a much more realistic feel to it.

Darker.

It’s Irish.

A lot less happens. No fancy plot twists. It’s honest writing.

Halfway through it I asked myself: Why can’t these people just be normal and stay together? They have the best reason for it. They have the best sex.

Then I thought how I deliberately and against my better judgement wrecked the relationship with a sexual Goddess and I had to conclude that this is the normal thing to do. It went FUBAR. Fucked Up Beyond All Recognition. But how much life can go in one year, how many highs and lows when you take a sledgehammer to the best thing that ever happened to you. When things are too good we have the perverse drive to ruin it. True love isn’t romantic. True love is doing the shopping on a Saturday morning. Until death slides the shopping list in half. An elastic bi-polar sort of relationship is romantic. Romantic love is breaking up and having unexpected make-up sex in some forgotten storage room of your university just when you thought you had finally said your last goodbye.

‘Happiness is never grand’, dixit Alduous Huxley.

It’s easy to bash this series and the book its based on. Too easy.

There is nothing here I can hate. There is nothing here not to like. And am many things but not a snob. I enjoyed it. I appreciated the easy language. Stripped of pretension. I especially liked the scenes where they discuss books.  Like Moll Flanders by William Defoe. They weren’t saying anything too incisive or revolutionary, but the characters had smarter things to say than my mute ‘am just here to receive a degree at the end of the ride’ classmates back when I tempted the Gods of Employment by studying Russian literature.

I also particularly liked how none of the sex scenes are written to try and arouse the reader. All the sex is there to reveal the mechanics of each character’s personality.

Just like it does in real life.

PS

One of the characters watched a documentary series on the American Civil War.  Most likely the most succesful one of all. The one by Ken Burns.